A globetrotting sculptor's works find a home

Born in 1951, Mr. Cemin moved with his family from Cruz Alta to Sao Paulo as a teenager. He fell in with a group of Surrealists and eventually attended the Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, which may explain why he embraces traditional techniques and handmade virtuosity. Feeling restless, he moved to New York in 1978, working as a printmaker until a Joseph Beuys retrospective at the Guggenheim a year later introduced him to a new range of possibilities.

"That was really a turning point," he said.

He dabbled with a more conceptual approach to art, "making drawings and doodles," he said, until the summer of 1983. Mr. Cemin closed himself off in a room for a week.

Seated at a table with a few basics - paper, pencils, paints and clay, he confronted what he called "the essential condition of every human," and made whatever he wanted. "I was open to anything," he recalled.

He modeled some 50 objects, "mugs with faces in them; strange, decorative or erotic objects; little animals; all sorts of things," he said. In the process he realized "that my conceptual framework was totally destroyed, because the objects themselves were so much more powerful than the concept."

Determined to accept himself as a sculptor, he brought stone to his studio and "began to carve."

Mr. Cemin was already part of New York's exploding East Village art scene of the '80s, having befriended artists like Jeff Koons and Mr. Halley. His work was selling in solo shows in New York, Los Angeles and Rome, and he was included in shows put on by Collins & Milazzo, a dynamic curatorial team at the time.

But he was soon restless again. In 1992 he rented a large house outside of Aswan, Egypt, where he made watercolors and iron sculptures. Two years later he enlisted carvers in Bali to help him produce pieces in teak and mahogany. And in 1999 he began making sculptures in Beijing.

The exhibits on Broadway and at Kasmin are a kind of coming home for Mr. Cemin. In August, the wayward artist signed a lease on a New York apartment. Piles of raw marble are stacked at his Brooklyn studio, including a 1,360-kilogram stone he said was "just asking to be carved."

He seemed excited about his return. "I'm going to be spending a lot more time here now," he said.