Gisele Camargo

Gisele Camargo’s career started in the 1990s in Rio de Janeiro, where urban topology influenced her early works and led to her growing interest in architectural shapes and constructions. Although the Rio de Janeiro depicted in postcards couldn’t be more different from the Rio experienced by its inhabitants, Camargo engaged in depicting both facets, at times through the use of reduced forms, in other works through color and composition, her vision of the city expanding and becoming familiar through grey scales and sharp edges. In 2018, the artist relocated her studio and home to the natural reserve of Cipó, situated in Jaboticatubas’s Cerrado biome, near Belo Horizonte. This change deeply influenced Camargo’s practice as she started to discover new landscapes, above and below the earth, which became the source of her most recent body of work. Stones, erosions, and flora all become departure points for her elaborated abstract constructions, which resonate with the power of nature and the environment. In this unceasing exploration of the landscape, often the artist turns to overlooked and submerged layers of the natural landscape with the same intensity given to inhabited corners of the city. Camargo’s oeuvre is primarily related to human existence and its surroundings, in light of current conditions and the emergency of climate change. As Cipó itself is one of the endangered sites in Brazil, Camargo’s presence and work there reduces the distance between the urban and rural, the landscape’s material existence, and the painting that becomes a landscape itself.

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Exhibitions