Sergio Camargo

Mitterrand | Temple is pleased to present, in collaboration with Galeria Raquel Arnaud (São Paulo), an exhibition dedicated to Sergio Camargo (1930–1990), a major figure in twentieth-century abstract sculpture. On view from October 20 to December 20, 2025, the exhibition offers a journey through more than three decades of creation.

Trained in Paris in the late 1940s, Camargo absorbed the ideas of Brancusi, Arp, and Vantongerloo before developing a radically singular body of work. It was also in Paris, in the early 1960s, that he conceived his celebrated white-painted wooden reliefs, composed of cylindrical fragments arranged in geometric rhythms. These compositions, where light itself becomes matter, brought him international recognition in 1963, when he received the International Sculpture Prize at the Paris Biennale.

Throughout his career, Paris remained a central place in his artistic journey: Camargo returned there regularly, exhibiting his work on several occasions. His last solo exhibition in the city took place in 1996 at Galerie Denise René, and his work was more recently shown in Reinvention of the Modern at Gagosian Gallery (2011), alongside leading Brazilian artists.

From the mid-1960s onward, settled in Massa Carrara, he chose white marble as his primary material. Its luminosity and fine grain enabled him to explore the interplay of shadow and volume with even greater depth. In the 1970s and 1980s, he also began working with Belgian black stone, whose density and opacity offered a radical counterpoint to marble. The contrast between black and white, absorption and reflection, became a defining principle of his research.

The selection presented in this exhibition reflects this evolution, from his early wooden reliefs to the refined marble and black-stone sculptures of his later years. It highlights a consistent artistic pursuit: transcending material form to create spaces that are luminous, silent, and meditative.

Organized in collaboration with Galeria Raquel Arnaud, the historic representative of the Camargo estate, the exhibition pays tribute to one of the most innovative sculptors of abstraction, whose works are held in major institutions such as the MoMA (New York), Tate (London), Centre Pompidou (Paris), and the Museu de Arte Moderno de São Paulo.