The hundreds, if not thousands, of square feet of fabric used in Neto’s sculptures is cut and sewn at his studio. Sometimes he buys the material already dyed—he has a contract with a Rio supplier for a certain shade of lilac that the factory has promised not to sell to anyone else. Other times he leaves it plain or dyes it himself. For this, his team fills up an inflatable swimming pool on the ground floor, where other heavy-duty work, such as cutting high-density foam, is performed. The cloth is then hung out in the backyard to dry.

Next, Neto spreads out the finished fabric on the top floor and “draws” where he wants the material to be cut by laying down a rope. “It gives me flexibility—I can change my mind far more easily than if I’d drawn in pencil,” he says. For his largest pieces, he rents the soccer field at the public high school across the street and lays out huge swaths of fabric all at once.

When it comes time to sew and assemble a major piece, Neto’s two staff seamstresses call in their sisters, grandmothers, daughters and cousins. Up to 20 women can fill the studio’s three floors, gossiping, laughing and eating as they work. The seamstresses have been with Neto for years and mostly know what he wants. They come from Rio’s periphery, often the favelas (as slums are called in Brazil), and rarely have any formal training. One was a maid when she came looking for work; Neto taught her how to use a needle and thread. “It’s the reality of Brazil,” he says. “Most people have very little formal education, but they’re creative. Because no one ever taught them how to do anything, they have to figure it all out from scratch, and they learn to use their imaginations.” He says that in Europe, where he’s stayed for long residencies, the artisans do fine work but get nervous when he asks for something unusual. “Here people just do it. If they don’t know how, they find someone else who does. Even with all the chaos here, I find it easier to get work done in Rio than in any other city in the world.”

Although Neto did not always create on such a large scale, he’s always worked with issues of balance and force, reason and sensuality. He entered university in Rio as an engineer but dropped out after a semester. A friend mentioned a sculpture class at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage, which has produced some of Brazil’s top artists. “I was 19. I made my first sculpture, and I knew that this was what I wanted to do with my life,” Neto says. He never went back to college. Instead, he heard that a Rio gallery—the now-closed Petite Galerie—was having an exhibition of younger sculptors and made an appointment to show his work. That led to his first solo show, in 1988.

Neto’s early sculptures, involving geometrically shaped iron slabs connected by a ligature, owed obvious debts to Russian Constructivists, American Minimalists and Brazilian neoconcretists, especially Lygia Clark. But even then, softness had a role.

He often used nylon stockings to hold the metal plates together and soon began filling them with lead ball bearings to experiment with weight and elasticity. “I first saw Neto’s work in 1989, in a small Rio gallery,” says Márcia Fortes, whose Galeria Fortes Vilaça, in São Paulo, represents the artist in Brazil. “All the elements that were to define his future body of work were already there: the preeminent organic form combined with a precise geometry, the concept of the work of art as a living organism, the use of gravity, the concern for balance and the soft, ordinary materials.”

Neto went on to replace lead with spices or Styrofoam balls, using the latter to create humanóides (humanoids) that one can sit on or hug and naves (ships) that one can enter. He built habitats out of foam and carved pathways inside them with a saw. “Neto is engaged with formalism, with how to use material and color,” says dealer Tanya Bonakdar, who staged his first New York show in 1996, after seeing his work at the home of Miami collector Rosa de la Cruz. “He’s one for the ages, but there’s also a warmth and generosity to his work that engages the public. When people walk into a show of his, they don’t just look around and walk out again. They stay.”