- Charles Merewether, 1993
02. Design
Saint Clair Cemin’s foray into design reflects the same bold, eclectic spirit that defines his sculptural work. His first major design project, the renovation of the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris in 2005, exemplifies his holistic approach to art. Tasked with contributing to the museum's aesthetic, Cemin merged naturalistic motifs with abstract surreal forms, creating an environment where art, nature, and history intertwine seamlessly. The project highlighted his ability to manipulate diverse materials and styles, producing what he describes as “interference patterns” that engage and provoke the viewer’s perception.
Cemin’s work for the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature marked the beginning of an expansive design journey, leading to collaborations with notable clients such as Diane von Furstenberg among many others. Whether through custom furniture, home decor, or architectural elements, his designs maintain a dialogue between form and function, art and everyday life. His first show of design will be w in London with the David Gill gallery in September 2025.
Recent Exhibitions
Tobias Mueller Modern
12 June to 20 September — Zürich, Switzerland
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
David Gill Gallery
12 September to 4 October — London, United Kingdom
David Gill Gallery is pleased to announce the inaugural design exhibition by internationally acclaimed sculptor Saint Clair Cemin.
Retaining 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
Selected Publications
Text: Heiko Klaas
Editor(s): Manfred Fischer, Manfred Möller
Published by: Kunstmedien MM GmbH, 2018
Binding: Paperback
Language: German
Text: Saint Clair Cemin
Editor(s): Pascale Lethorel
Published by: Beaux Arts de
Paris Editions, 2017
Binding: Paperback
Language: French
Editor(s): Agnaldo Farias
Published by: Bolsa de Arte Editions, 2014
Binding: Paperback
Language: Portuguese
Editor(s): Mark Makin
Published by: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2012
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Text: Omar-Pascual Castillo, trans: Eduardo Aparicio
Published by: Sikkema Jenkins, Co., 2010
Binding: Hardcover
Language: Spanish/English
Text: David Barro, Omar-Pascual Castillo, Javier Sanchez, Octavio Zaya
Editor(s): Javier Sanchez
Published by: Centro Atlantico de Arte Moderno La Palmas de Gran Canaria, 2013
Binding: Hardcover
Language: Spanish/English/German
Published by: Editions Alain Noirhomme, 2007
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English/French
Text: Richard Milazzo
Published by: Brent Sikkema Editions, 2005
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Text: Saint Clair Cemin
Published by: Edgewise
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Text: Alan Jones
Published by: Carrie Secrist Gallery, 1999
Binding: Hardcover
Language: English
Text: Remo Guidieri
Published by: Gallery Lars Bohman, 1998
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Text: Marcia Fortes & Saint Clair Cemin, trans: Ciano Noroes
Editor(s): Sonia Cardoso
Published by: Centro Cultural Light
Binding: Paperback
Language: Portuguese/English
Saint Clair Cemin
(born in Cruz Alta, Brazil, 1951) is a postmodern sculptor. He lives and works between Woodbury, CT, and Hydra, Greece.
From the naturalistic to the abstract surreal, Saint Clair Cemin’s broad sculptural vocabulary presents a bold panoply of work that is both striking and immediate. Cannibalizing the history of sculpture itself, as well as its many styles and techniques, Cemin’s inventive forms span the vast expanse of the visual universe. Cemin has been very influential on the younger generation of the ’90s and 2000s, mostly in Brazil, his native country, where he became well-known after his participation in the 1992 IXth Documenta in Kassel, curated by Jan Hoet. He defends a holistic approach to art where all of art’s parameters are to be explored and exploited. This is shown in his use of different artistic languages, which are sometimes presented in anarchic combination, in order to produce what he calls “interference patterns” in the mind of the viewer.
Cemin began drawing at an early age, contributing to illustrations for magazines such as Planeta in the mid 1960s. In 1975, he enrolled at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, where he specialised in etching. Shortly after graduating, he moved to New York City where he worked primarily in printmaking. He began experimenting with sculpture after seeing the 1979 retrospective of Joseph Beuys at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He exhibited his sculpture for the first time at the Red Bar in 1982, and soon after became a key figure in New York’s East Village art scene.
Exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad, Cemin’s work is also included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, Paris, France; Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Long Island City, NY; Rooseum, Stockholm, Sweden; Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil, among many others.
Public Collections
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
FNAC (Fonds National d’Art Contemporain), Paris, France
Inhotim, Minas Gerais, Brazil
S.M.A.K., Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Gent
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris
Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles, California
Emily Fisher Landau Collection, Long Island City
Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico
Hakone Open‑Air Museum, Japan
Sydney and Walda Besthoff Sculpture Garden at NOMA, New Orleans
MEIAC – Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo, Badajoz, Spain
Rooseum, Stockholm, Sweden
MARGS – Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
The Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, New Jersey
The Bellevue Hospital, New York
Chase Manhattan Bank, New York
Motorola, Inc., Schaumburg, Illinois
Reston Town Center, Reston, Virginia
Telenor AS, Bergen, Norway
Bastads Kommun, Sweden
Past Exhibitions
2025
Tosca, David Gill Gallery, London, 12 September – 4 October 2025
Saint Clair Cemin, Tobias Mueller Modern Art Gallery, Zurich, 12 June – 20 September 2025
2024
Ser Híbrido, Galeria Millan, São Paulo, 9 March – 13 April 2024
2020-2021
All About Woman, Galerie Baronian Xippas, Brussels, 19 December 2020- 30 January 2021
2018
Oedipus, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, 8 March – 30 April 2018
2017-2018
Pontresina Inaugural Group Show, Plutschow Gallery, Zurich, 18 December 2017 – 4 February 2018
Even Banks Have Souls, Plutschow Gallery, Zurich, 1 December 2017 – 24 February 2018
2016
Summer Sculpture Exhibition, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, 7 July – 19 August 2016
Psyche, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, 26 May – 19 August 2016
2015
Symbolista, Galeria Bolsa de Arte, Sao Paulo, 6 April – 16 May 2015
2014
Myth and Math, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, 30 October – 23 December 2014.
2013
Espejo Barroco, Centro Atlantico de Arte Contemporaneo, Canary Islands, 26 October 2012 – 10 February 2013
Saint Clair Cemin on Broadway, Outstanding installation New York City, 6 September 2012 – 30 January 2013
2012
SIX, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, 6 September – 13 October 2012
Triunfo da Razão Natural, Luciana Brito Galeria, São Paulo, 22 March – 30 April 2012
2010
Pensamentos, Bolsa de Arte, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 14 October – 16 November 2010
Splendeur et Misère, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France, 5 June – 25 July 2010
2009
Da Pureza ao Enigma, Retrospective at the Instituto Tomie Ohtake, São Paulo, 22 May– 5 July 2009
2008
Witness, Sikkema Jenkins, Co. New York City, May 8th, 2008
2007
The Beijing Series, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France, September 8th – October 22nd, 2007
Solo show, Galerie Alain Noirhomme, Brussels, Belgium, April 2007
2006
Solo show, Galeria Brito Cimino, São Paulo, Brazil, May 16th 2006
2005
Saluti da Vietri, Galleria Paolo Curti/Annamaria Gambuzzi & Co. Milan, Italy, March 7 – June 7 2005
2004
Dessins et sculptures, Oeuvres de Saint Clair Cemin, Galerie Baudoin Lebon, Paris, France, October 19th – December 3rd, 2004
Gods of the People, Brent Sikkema, New York City, October 9th – November 13th 2004
2003
Bienal Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, October 4th – December 7th 2003
Solo show, Bolsa de Arte, Porto Alegre, Brazil, October 10th – October 30th 2003
2002
Solo show, Galleria Sperone, Rome, Italy, January 2002
The Mind, Cheim & Read, New York City, February 12th – March 16th 2002
2001
Saint Clair Cemin, Museo De Arte Moderno, Mexico, March 20th – May 26th 2001
2000
Solo show, Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, March 2000
Saint Clair Cemin, Casa Iteso-Clavigero, Mexico, November 14th-February 16th, 2000
Saint Clair Cemin Sculpture, Lever House Lobby Gallery, New York City, February 23rd – April 30th, 2000
Solo show, Galeria Camargo Vilaça, Sao Paulo, Brazil, June 6th – 30th, 2000
1999
Solo show, The Arts Club of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, February 9th – April 3rd, 1999
Solo show, Galeria Enrique Guererro, Mexico City, Mexico, February 18th – April 24th, 1999
1998
Solo show, Cheim & Read, New York City, June 8th – July 12th, 1998
Saint Clair Cemin: Bronzes, Velge & Noirhomme, Brussels, Belgium, September 23rd – November 15th, 1998
Man Woman Tree Boat House Car Golem, Gallerie Lars Bohman, Stockholm, Sweden, April 18th – May 24th, 1998
Saint Clair Cemin: Chimera, Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, D.C., October 15th – December 5th, 1998
Perspectives, Saint Clair Cemin, Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, Alabama, December 5th – June 6th,
1998
1997
Solo show, Galeria Camargo Vilaça , São Paulo, Brazil, March 1997
Saint Clair Cemin, Sculptures, Centro Cultural Light, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, April 10th – May 11th, 1997
1996
Saint Clair Cemin: Four New Sculptures, Robert Miller Gallery, New York City, May 20th – Jun 21st, 1996
1995
Solo show, Galeria Camargo Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil, 1995
Saint Clair Cemin: Sculptures, Gian Ferrari Contemporanea, Milan, Italy, March 9th – April 13th, 1995
1994
Solo show, Robert Miller Gallery, New York City, November 28th – January 6th, 1994.
Escultura de Saint Clair Cemin, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Monterrey, Mexico,, January – May 1994
Sculpture of Saint Clair Cemin, Center for the Fine Arts, Miami,, October 8th – December 31st, 1994
Solo show, Galeria Camargo Vilaça, São Paulo, Brazil 1994
Solo show, Gallerie Lars Bohman, Stockholm, Sweden, March 10th – April 12th, 1994
Solo show, Robert Miller Gallery, New York City, April 19th – May 21st, 1994
Solo show, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France, November 26th – December 31st, 1994
1993
Saint Clair Cemin: About Materials, The Greenberg Gallery, St. Louis, Missouri, February 4th – March 31st. 1993
Saint Clair Cemin, Anders Tornberg Gallery, Lund, Sweden, April 3 – 28th 1993
Solo show, Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, October 9th – November 7th, 1993
1992
New Sculpture, Robert Miller Gallery, New York City, March 3rd – April 4th, 1992
Solo show, Galleria Soledad Lorenzo, Madrid, September 16th – October 17th, 1992
The Human Condition, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York City, October 29th – December 5th, 1992
Directions, Saint Clair Cemin, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D.C., October 17th 1991 – January 19th, 1992.
Solo show, Baumgartner Galleries, Washington, D.C., 16 November – 13 December,1992
Saint Clair Cemin: Recent Sculpture, Daniel Weinberg Gallery – Santa Monica, CA, November 7th – November 30th, 1992
1991
Saint Clair Cemin, Witte de With, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, June 15th – July 21st, 1991
Solo show, Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Paris, France,, December 1st – January 19th, 1991
1990
Solo show, Anders Tornberg Gallery, Lund, Sweden. 1990
Solo show, Massimo Audiello Gallery and Sperone-Westwater Gallery, New York,, September 15th – October 13th, 1990
1989
Solo show, Gian Enzo Sperone Gallery, Rome, Italy, February 1989
Solo show, Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York City, April 22nd- May 20th, 1989
1988
Solo show, Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, January 30th – February 27th, 1988
Solo show, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Chicago, Illinois,, October 14th – November 11th, 1988
1987
Solo show, Massimo Audiello Gallery, New York City, October 22nd – November 21st, 1987
1986
Solo show, Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York City, October 9th – November 1st 1986
1985
Solo show, Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York City, October 9th – November 12th, 1985
1984
Solo show, Beulah Land, New York City, 1984
1982
Solo show, Galleria Projecta, São Paulo, Brazil ,1982
Installation at The Red Bar, New York City, 1982
1981
Solo show, Galeria Guinard, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1981
Solo show, Galeria Projecta, São Paulo, Brazil, 1981
1980
Solo show, The White Room, Hasselt, Belgium, 21 September – 20 October 1980
1979
Solo show, Galeria Projecta, São Paulo, Brazil – 1979
Solo show, Galeria Guinard, Porto Alegre, Brazil – 1979
Contact
Almeida & Dale
Rua Fradique Coutinho, 1360-1430, Pinheiros, São Paulo, 05416-001, Brazil
T +55 11 3031-6007
info@millan.art
Tobias Mueller Modern
Waldmannstrasse 8, 8001 Zürich, Switzerland
T +41 44 272 5000
info@muellermodern.com
David Gill Gallery
2-4 King St, St. James's
London SW1Y 6QP, United Kingdom
T +44 20 3195 6600
info@davidgillgallery.com
Gallerie Xippas
Ruta 104, km 5, Manantiales
Punta del Este, Uruguay
T +598 9348 2782
Studio
info@ceminstudio.com