Campana Brothers: Hybridism at Carpenters Workshop Gallery

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 9 min

Thirteen works of cast bronze, cast aluminium and pirarucu fish leather, shown at Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s Mayfair space in 2019, made the argument that Humberto and Fernando Campana had been building for four decades: that a hybrid object, made from whatever material a place actually has, is a more honest kind of design than a pure one. The show’s Noah series turned that argument into a story, casting animal forms in bronze as though an ark had just been unloaded.

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Hybridism, the Campana Brothers’ first solo exhibition at Carpenters Workshop Gallery, opened at the gallery’s Mayfair space at 3-4 Albemarle Street, London, on 22 March 2019 and ran until 17 May 2019. It brought together 13 furniture objects and sculptures by Humberto and Fernando Campana, the São Paulo brothers who have spent four decades turning waste materials, found objects and craft techniques into some of the most collected design of the past thirty years.

The show’s centrepiece was a body of work the brothers call the Noah series: benches, tables and wall pieces cast in bronze and aluminium, populated with stacked and intertwined animal forms that read as a menagerie loaded onto an ark. Around it sat a second strand of work upholstered in pirarucu leather, tanned skin from one of the Amazon’s largest freshwater fish, worked into lounge chairs and a low buffet.

The title was not a marketing flourish. Humberto Campana has described hybridism as the brothers’ actual process, the deliberate mixing of materials, forms, textures and techniques that do not obviously belong together, and he has traced that instinct back further than any single object: to his own account of Brazilian identity as something built from mixture rather than purity. That is the argument this piece follows, from the objects themselves to where the idea came from and where else it had already appeared.

What Hybridism actually put in the room

The 13 pieces split roughly into two material families, and both did real work rather than sitting there as texture.

The Noah Bench anchored the show: a bronze and aluminium frame supporting a seat of roughly woven, thickly cut fabric strips, with cast animal forms worked into the structure rather than applied to it afterwards. The Noah Wall Table carried the same logic onto a wall-mounted surface, its bronze legs cast as intertwined animal figures holding up a flat top. Both pieces treated the animal not as ornament bolted onto furniture but as the furniture’s actual structural logic, the thing doing the load-bearing.

The second material family ran through pirarucu leather, made from the skin of the pirarucu, a fish that can grow to two metres in the Amazon basin and whose skin is typically discarded as a byproduct of the food trade. The Pirarucu Buffet, a low storage cabinet, and the Sereia Pirarucu Lounge Chair, whose name nods to the Portuguese word for mermaid, both wore panels of the leather across cast bronze frames. A related Pirarucu Armchair paired the same leather with bronze legs. Elsewhere, the Branches Sofa cast actual tree branch forms in bronze beneath a woven fabric seat, and the Arachnid Armchair wrapped a frame in roughly woven fabric that spread across the piece like a web.

Each piece used casting, the transfer of a fluid or malleable material into a fixed mould, to preserve the exact texture of something that would ordinarily decay or dissolve: a branch, a woven mat, an animal’s mass and posture. Bronze and aluminium do not rot. Whatever went into the mould stays legible in the metal permanently, which is a specific technical reason the work reads as more than decoration. It is a way of making something temporary structural.

The Noah series, and why an ark

The Noah series drew directly on the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark, using the story of animals gathered two by two as the organising idea for a body of design work about coexistence and preservation. Humberto Campana has connected the series explicitly to environmental concern, describing pieces that are visually playful but carry real weight, a response to habitat loss and the pressure human activity puts on other species.

That reading matters for how the animal forms in the Noah pieces should be understood. They are not naturalistic. Bodies stack, limbs intertwine, and single creatures blur into groups in a way that owes more to surrealism than to wildlife illustration, deliberately, because the point of the series was never anatomical accuracy. It was density: an ark carrying more than it should reasonably hold, which is roughly the position most of the world’s threatened habitats are actually in.

Who made it: four decades from law and architecture to bronze animals

Humberto Campana, born in 1953, studied law before turning to design. His younger brother Fernando, born in 1961, trained as an architect. The two founded their São Paulo studio, Estudio Campana, in 1983, and their earliest recognised body of work, the 1989 Desconfortáveis (Uncomfortables) collection, already carried the instinct that would define everything after it: furniture built from awkward, everyday materials, given enough conviction to be shown as design rather than apologised for as improvisation.

International recognition followed through two pieces made with the Italian manufacturer Edra. The Favela chair, designed in 1991 and now held in the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is built from short lengths of solid wood nailed together in overlapping layers, a direct physical reference to the improvised, additive construction of Brazilian informal housing. The Vermelha chair followed, its frame wrapped in more than 500 metres of cord wound and knotted by hand rather than woven on a loom. Both pieces set the template Hybridism continued three decades later: take a technique or material most of the design world treats as unrefined, and prove it can carry the same formal ambition as bronze or marble.

That template extends to how the studio works, not just what it makes. Estudio Campana has built ongoing relationships with craftspeople, small workshops and community groups around São Paulo, treating hand technique as a resource to be developed rather than a cost to be engineered out. The pirarucu leather in Hybridism sits in that lineage directly: a material the fishing trade discards, given the same finishing attention as cast bronze, upholstered onto furniture bound for a Mayfair gallery.

Hybrid as biography, not metaphor

The show’s title asks to be taken literally, and Humberto Campana has explained why in terms that go well beyond a design brief. He has described Brazilians as a hybrid people, their identity built from mixture since Portuguese colonisation began, rather than descended from a single unbroken tradition. Hybridism, in that account, is not a style the brothers adopted. It is a description of where they are from, applied to furniture.

That is worth stating plainly because it reframes what could otherwise read as an eclectic aesthetic choice, mixing bronze with fish leather, myth with material research, as something closer to a stated position. A pirarucu skin and a cast bronze branch sitting on the same object are not there because they look interesting together. They are there because the brothers have argued, consistently, that Brazilian design should look like Brazil actually is: assembled from unlike parts, and better for it.

Two Hybridisms, two years apart

The title Hybridism did not begin in Mayfair. Two years earlier, in September 2017, the Campana Brothers opened a show of the same name at Friedman Benda in New York, their second solo exhibition at that gallery. The Noah series made its debut there, alongside a Branches Sofa, a Sereia Pirarucu piece and an Arachnid Armchair, all under the same bronze-and-myth logic that would travel to London.

The two shows were not identical. New York’s 2017 presentation included a Noah Candleholder, Noah Vase and Noah Side Table that did not reappear in London, while London’s 2019 selection added the Pirarucu Buffet and Pirarucu Armchair, pieces built specifically around the fish-leather material family. Read together rather than separately, the two exhibitions show a working body of work still being extended two years and one Atlantic crossing later, with the ark motif proving durable enough to support new furniture rather than being retired after its first outing. That continuity, which neither gallery’s own materials draws attention to, is the clearer story: Hybridism was never a single exhibition. It is an ongoing project that happened to visit two galleries under one title.

Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s role

Hybridism was staged at Carpenters Workshop Gallery’s Mayfair premises, one of the gallery’s earliest expansions beyond its original converted-workshop space in Chelsea, opened in 2008. The gallery, founded by Julien Lombrail and Loïc Le Gaillard, has built its identity on treating design objects with the seriousness usually reserved for sculpture, a position its 2025 to 2026 Paris exhibition Radical Making later traced across six decades of the gallery’s own history.

The Campana Brothers’ work fits that argument directly. Cast bronze, treated as a permanent record of a woven mat or a discarded fish skin, is exactly the kind of object that refuses to sit comfortably in either the furniture or the sculpture category, which is the territory Carpenters Workshop Gallery has spent almost two decades claiming as its own.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to read Hybridism as a striking one-off, a gallery show built around a good title and a memorable material. The more accurate reading is that it was one stop in a project the Campana Brothers had already been running for two years by the time it reached Mayfair, and one technique in a practice they had been building since 1983.

The Noah series works because the metaphor and the material do the same job at once. Bronze holds the shape of something that would otherwise disappear, whether that is a woven mat, a tree branch or a fish skin destined for a bin. Casting is preservation made physical, which is exactly what the ark story is about. The Campana Brothers did not illustrate that idea. They built it out of the actual discarded material of their own country, then gave it a permanent form in one of the oldest technical processes design has.

What Hybridism ultimately argued, across both its London and New York outings, is that hybrid does not mean impure or provisional. For two Brazilian designers who have described their own national identity as a mixture rather than a single tradition, a bronze cast of a fish skin sitting next to a cast bronze branch is not a compromise between materials. It is the clearest possible statement of where the work comes from.