Sergio de Camargo was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1933. He first studied with Lucio Fontana in Buenos Aires but then pursued a long list of studies in Paris, where he lived from 1948 to 1953. As a student, de Camargo balanced his practical art studies with more theoretical ones: he studied philosophy at La Sorbonne with teachers such as Gaston Bachelard​ and meanwhile trained in arts at Académie de la Grande Chaumière. During his second stay in Paris in 1961, he attended a sociology class at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. In Paris, de Camargo met some of the people that would influence his early work including Henri Laurens, Jean Arp, Georges Vantongerloo, and Brancusi. He joined the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, a group of artists interested in Kinetic art, with active members such as Carlos Cruz-Diez and Victor Vasarely. In 1963, he started his Relief series, which bears early characteristics of what would become his mature work: the experimentation between volume and deep cuts within matter. The Relief series are all white reliefs on flat surfaces, in different materials such as Carrara marble and wood. De Camargo participated in two large exhibitions at this time: the 33rd Venice Biennial and the 1968 Documenta in Kassel. In 1973, he returned to Brazil and set up an interesting and artistic environment to make his creations. In 1981, he had a retrospective show at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro. De Camargo has public sculptures in France and Brazil, and his pieces are in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Hirschhorn Museum.