Recent Exhibitions
Saint Clair Cemin: Plano como uma galaxia, curvo como desejo - Bolsa de Arte
1 September to 11 October 2026 — Porto Alegre, Brazilcurated by Omar Pascual Castillo
Catalogue
This is the first exhibition in which this important Brazilian artist, internationally renowned for his sculptures and installations, offers an anthological survey of his extensive two-dimensional work on canvas and paper. Through 46 small-format paintings, 23 drawings, and 13 prints, Cemin’s universe unfolds as a hybrid, promiscuous, and seductive cosmogony in which, on one hand, the heroic element (of the tireless, elusive, always rebellious avant-garde artist) and, on the other, the mysterious and erotic element (of an adult with tropical memories), whisper love songs. Songs that recreate how his visions shape a symbolic legacy, flat as a galaxy and curved as desire. An experience in which every ideal becomes something ready to be caressed, as when we touch the sacred pages of a book.
Text: Omar Pascual Castillo
Tobias Mueller Modern
12 June to 20 September 2025 — Zürich, SwitzerlandWhitewall Magazine Family Style
This exhibition presents sculptures by the Brazilian artist that enter into dialogue with earlier works, offering a retrospective view of his multifaceted oeuvre. The show includes both new works and selected earlier pieces. Many of the exhibited sculptures refer to previous phases of his work in terms of motif or form, while others explore entirely new directions. Together, they form a layered panorama that brings the richness of Cemin’s artistic thinking into view.
Cemin’s work exists in a productive tension with art history: on the one hand, it reflects classical sculpture – from Greco-Roman antiquity through the Renaissance to Brancusi and Giacometti; on the other, it deconstructs traditional notions of form and sculptural autonomy. In his practice, Cemin combines figurative, abstract, and ornamental elements in unorthodox ways, enabling him to draw complex connections between art, philosophy, and science. His sculptures are thus never purely formal or illustrative, but always part of a broader metaphysical inquiry into the nature of the world and subjectivity. Cemin describes his creative process as a revelation of the self: “It’s impossible to create more than what you are. You can only unveil more of yourself.” (BOMB Magazine, 1994). This introspective approach is reflected in his sculptures, which often appear as poetic metamorphoses – organic, flowing, and at the same time, precisely constructed. Classical sculpture, architectural fragments, and imaginary forms overlap in them, forming works that are as visually engaging as they are intellectually resonant.
In many of his works, Cemin deliberately plays with the connotation of the aesthetic: He combines the sublime with the ridiculous, the graceful with the grotesque. This ambivalence lends his sculptures a peculiar tension – they are beautiful, but never pleasing; expressive, but never unambiguous. Figures such as the three-legged Ballerina, the bulging Double Duck or the over-dimensioned Spirit epitomise this oscillation between form and meaning. They reveal an understanding of sculpture that does not marginalise the changeable and contradictory, but rather makes it productive.Cemin’s work is held in major public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain in Paris, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and Inhotim in Brazil. His most important solo exhibitions include Directions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington (1992), Resonances at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico City (2001), and Baroque Mirror at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Gran Canaria (2013).
Text: Tobias Mueller Modern Art
TOSCA - David Gill Gallery
12 September to 4 October 2025 — London, United KingdomRetaining the artist's postmodern spirit whilst being inspired by nature, this selection marks nearly two decades of experimentation. The new collection of bronze works includes candle holders, seating, tables, and a chandelier. The series revolves around a sense of warmth that arises through storytelling, with whales dozing in the branches of trees, monkeys swinging through the air clutching books, and a chandelier stretches out like a spider’s web of bronze. “I decided to do something a little more fun,” says Cemin. “Animal comes from the word anima. It’s what gives soul to something, makes it animated. If it’s not animals that animate the work, the form has to do it.”
Cemin’s work often plays with a sense of elusive temporality, and as an artist he revels in the sense that we might not know what era his sculpture or design has come from. His work ‘Mercury Fountain’ in Virginia was installed in 1990 but is adorned with a mythological figure. “I like the idea of the lack of synchronicity. That you cannot know what time you’re living in,” says Cemin.
This is a spirit that has continued into the ‘rococo sauvage’ collection. “They could be antiques,” he adds. In these objets décoratifs there is also a sense of the artisanal or handmade. Cemin starts each design with many sketches and drawings, and for this collection each object was made at the same scale of its maquette. Despite their disparities in scale, Cemin is well known for his large-scale works, many of which animate public spaces, he does not create a sense of distinction between his sculptural and design work. “There is continuity. For me to make a sculpture or make a table, it’s the same thing,” he notes. “Da Vinci said that art lives off constraints and dies of excessive freedom. I find design difficult because of the challenge, but I like the challenge.”
Text: David Gill Gallery
SER HIBRIDO - Almeida e Dale
09 March – 13 April 2024 — Sao Paulo, BrazilSculptor Saint Clair Cemin opens the solo show Being Hybrid at Millan, his first exhibition in Brazil in almost ten years. The event includes a talk between the artist and New York critic Paul Laster and also marks the reopening of the gallery’s building, which has undergone major renovations, beginning last November.
Cemin has created six bronze sculptures especially for the show. Each piece condenses various movements, shapes, and references into a singular entity. For instance, Panguri unites the shapes of a horse, a boy, and an airplane, creating, in the artist’s words, a “chimera”.
Another sculpture, which has also been given the orange patina coating of the works in the exhibition, evokes Capoeira and is comprised of two separate pieces that appear to be moving in rhythm with one another. A comparable effect happens with Infante, which “in principle should turn or tumble when we walk around it, depending on the point of view,” Cemin explains.
Text: Millan Gallery
All About Woman - Baronian-Xippas
1 December 2020 – 30 January 2021 -Brussels, Belgium All About Woman is the first solo show of Saint Clair Cemin with the Baronian-Xippas.
Saint Clair Cemin has always seen art as a natural field of experimentation. For his sculptures, he uses different styles, techniques, and materials and draws inspiration from philosophy, literature, poetry, science, and the history of art. His works, which go beyond abstraction and figuration, in a universe of metamorphosis, evoke both plant and sexual forms as well as molecular structures.
Oedipus - Kasmin Gallery
March 8 – April 18, 2018 - New York, USAThe exhibition’s title work, Oedipus, functions as its focal point and represents Cemin’s first exploration into the form of narrative sculpture; a traditional folk practice popular in his native Northeastern Brazil. Twenty sculptural tableaux are cast in bronze, each presented on an individual plinth and placed in a spiral formation that curves into the center of the gallery. Tiresias, the blind prophet of Apollo, revered for his clairvoyance, takes the role of narrator and sits at the center of the configuration, posed gesticulating as though in the midst of a passionate retelling of the tragedy.
The scenes, while remaining true to the myth’s original narrative, are humorously embellished by Cemin to include an array of carnivalesque incarnations of the tragic hero. Oedipus takes on a human form when confronting the emblematic Sphynx; a monstrous figure when he meets Iocasta; a giant, raging baby when he murders Laius; and lastly a helpless, blind chimpanzee being led by the hand of Antigone. This act of retelling—its ability to create anew as it amends what was before—is a central facet of the exhibition. By contributing his own unique rendering of Oedipus to the manifold versions belonging to literary and oral history, Cemin underscores the nature of storytelling: its inherently transmutable essence; its ability to espouse a central philosophical tenet even as the particularities of the narrative shift and mutate.
The works presented in the second room of the gallery are what Cemin refers to as ‘domestic monuments,’ each depicting a Greek character: ‘Logos’ and ‘Ismene.’ ‘Logos,’ realized in the form of a large-scale parrot on a green perch, embodies the spirit of the incantatory word such as that referred to by St John in the gospel. ‘Ismene’, sister of Antigone, represents a monument to the lesser-celebrated sibling. The works have all been forged in Cemin’s foundry just ten miles outside of Thebes (the city of which Oedipus, according to the myth, was King.)
Psyche - Kasmin Gallery
May 26 – August 19, 2016Paul Kasmin Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition of Psyche by Saint Clair Cemin, on view from May 26 – August 19, 2016 at 297 Tenth Avenue, New York.
Internationally renowned sculptor Saint Clair Cemin will unveil the ethereal sculpture Psyche, a large-scale marble boat that appears to float atop its bronze cradle. Measuring over 16 feet in length and carved from a single piece of Sichuan marble that began as 30,000 pounds, the work alludes to its namesake Psyche, goddess of the soul, and her true love, Eros. Though the viewer is drawn into antiquity, the sculpture transcends its legendary inspiration as it becomes a fully functional boat, capable of floating on water.
Inspired by the original tale in which Psyche and Eros are reunited and married by the gods, Cemin gives rise to the mysticism of this classical story of love and desire. In this portrayal of the myth, Psyche serves as the vessel (the soul) for Eros, who is symbolized by a long snake that stretches along the length of the boat and embraces both the bow and the stern in a highly stylized fashion.
Though the stone began as a strong, solid block, through the careful and delicate crafting of the walls, the vessel develops a translucency when lit from behind. The quietness of the sculpture, despite its grand scale, mirrors the true love of Psyche and Eros.