Iberê Camargo’s work covers fundamental aspects of modern painting in the second half of the twentieth century. In his early career, he produced landscapes, portraits and still lifes that reveal his reverence for traditional genres of painting. Over time, his work increasingly featured the motif of the spool, an object that takes on an autonomous meaning in his work.  At first, the spool was a fragment of the artist’s childhood memory. Over roughly twenty years of intense experimentation, Iberê gradually freed it from the need to represent reality. With this object, the painter began to discuss issues such as form, weight, structure, balance, mobility or immobility. 

It is also with the spools that the artist’s journey towards abstraction and a unique expressionist language began. In his paintings from the 1960s and 1970s, Iberê invested in the densification and saturation of matter, gesture and expressiveness. The dense layers of paint that characterized his canvases in those years persist in Iberê’s return to figuration from the 1980s onwards. During this period, the tragic aspect of his work gained prominence, culminating in a moment of significant public recognition for his poetics. The artist’s late work depicts wandering figures and empty spaces, and fearlessly welcomes the absence of meaning, expressing a restless view of existence and the human condition.

Throughout his career, Iberê Camargo took part in numerous solo exhibitions and biennials, both in Brazil and abroad.These include: Bienal de São Paulo (1959, 1961, 1963, 1971, 1975 and 1979); Tokyo Biennale (1961); and Venice Biennale (1962). In 1966 he was invited to create a large panel as a gift from the Brazilian government for the inauguration of the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1995, the Iberê Camargo Foundation was established in Porto Alegre, a fundamental institution for the preservation of the artist’s work and legacy. His works are part of important public collections such as: MAM São Paulo, Brazil; Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói – MAC Niterói, Brazil; Museu de Arte do Rio Grande do Sul – MARGS, Brazil; as well as major private collections in Brazil.