Camargo, Sergio de (1930–1990)

Sergio de Camargo (b. 8 April 1930, d. 1990), Brazilian sculptor. A native of Rio de Janeiro, Camargo left Brazil in the 1940s. In 1946 he entered the Academia d'Altimira art school in Buenos Aires, where he studied with the artist Emilio Pettoruti and one of the school's founders, the painter Lucio Fontana. He went to Europe for the first time in 1948, and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. Influenced by Constantin Brancuçsi, Jean Arp, and Georges Vantongerloo, he began to sculpt. From 1948 to 1974, Camargo lived in Paris. In 1953, he traveled to Rio de Janeiro, where he exhibited several of his sculptural works in Rio's National Salon of Modern Art. He also made a brief trip to China.

Although figural sculpture predominated in his early years, Camargo experimented with wood reliefs, geometric abstractionism, and constructivism. Along with contemporaries Julio Le Parc and Carlos Cruz Diez, Camargo was also one of the pioneers of kinetic art. Using a cylinder or cube, he arranged forms and explored the "madness of order." He received the International Sculpture Prize at the 1963 Paris Biennale. In 1965, he began sculptural pieces for Oscar Niemeyer's Foreign Ministry Building in Brasília. In the same year, he was named best national sculptor in the São Paulo Bienal. He returned to Rio de Janeiro in 1974, and in 1977 he won the sculpture award given by the São Paulo Association of Art Critics. In the 1980s Camargo had solo exhibitions in both the Rio and São Paulo museums of modern art, and he participated in the 1982 Venice Biennale.

See alsoArt: The Twentieth Century .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Arte no Brasil, vol. 2 (1979), esp. p. 933.

Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America (1989), esp. pp. 270-275.

Additional Bibliography

Brecheret, Vítor. Brazilian sculpture from 1920 to 1990. Washington, DC: Cultural Center, Inter-American Development Bank, 1997.

Brito, Ronaldo. Sergio Camargo: Espacos da arte brasileira. São Paulo: Cosac & Naify Edições, 2000.

                              Caren A. Meghreblian