LONDON.- David Gill Gallery announced the inaugural design exhibition by internationally acclaimed sculptor Saint Clair Cemin. Retaining the artist's postmodern spirit whilst being inspired by nature, the collection marks nearly two decades of experimentation.

The new collection of bronze works includes five 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 began his design career 18 years ago with a commission to renovate the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris. Tasked with creating pieces that would complement the museum’s collections, he focused on hunting and nature in the 16th to 19th centuries, whilst retaining a contemporary feel this led him to develop a style, he calls rococo sauvage, featuring bronze decorative objects and fittings inspired by forms found in nature, such as warping vine-like banisters and handles.

He later evolved the style in projects for private clients, most notably a series of tables based on the four seasons for Diane Von Furstenberg’s palazzo in Venice.

Catalonian architect Antoni Gaudí, a key influence on Saint Clair Cemin’s work, is evident in this collection through its rough qualities and forms that evoke both natural forms and an otherworldly feel. Among the pieces is a bowl resembling a fusion of coral and an animal skull, while a chandelier takes on a sinewy, spider-like appearance.

Saint Clair Cemin, who was born in Brazil and now resides between Greece and the USA, matured as an artist in the heavily conceptual and exhilaratingly innovative 1980s New York art scene. His path to sculpture began in 1983, when a self-imposed experiment led him to lock himself in a room for a week with raw clay. “Once I started touching and making things in clay, I could not stop. Two days later when the clay ran out, I broke my own rules and bought another 50 kilos of clay,” he says. “I discovered sculpture, and I became completely fascinated by it. It’s a way of thinking, a way of living through the material with your hands.”

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.”

The exhibition will be on view from 11 September to 4 October 2025.