Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro

Biography

Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro is a Brazilian artist living in Geneva. After studying at the Fine Art School of the Rio de Janeiro Federal University, she graduated from the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts of Geneva.

 She went back to Brazil in 1976, but left Rio at the beginning of the 1980’s and settled in New York, where she joined the Art Student’s League. There, she learnt how to sculpt and carve stone. She became passionate about marble in Sérgio Camargo’s studio: “I worked with marble for ten years. I discovered alabaster in New York and thought it was a beautiful stone. But I did not want the stone to be the work’s attraction” – she tells. “Technically, I was self-taught. That is why I have not made any exhibitions for a long time. I used the same marble as Sérgio Camargo. A white marble, with no veins, that comes from Massa, next to Carrara, in Italy. I went to Tuscany and discovered an Etruscan city that made funerary urns with alabaster: Volterra. This is how my work came back to figuration.”

 Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro privileges natural materials such as alabaster or selenite, exploring their translucent qualities and their colour variations. She sometimes combines them with gold leaf or animal skin. The shapes of her sculptures are both organic and geometrical, created by size or subtraction of matter. “Some works take us back to the origins and to subterranean worlds, as if they seem difficult to date. The choice of raw and precious materials, and of some generic and archetypal forms, accompanies and supports a double desire to inscribe the emergence of Art and the birth of forms in a continuity, and to situate them, as if out of time, in a tension towards an absolute horizon.”

In 2013, the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro made a monographic exhibition dedicated to Maria-Carmen Perlingeiro, titled Luz de Pedra. In 2015, Maria-Carmen presented her exhibition Esculturas at the Brasilea Foundation in Basel.