Wanda Pimentel

Rio de Janeiro, 1973

For a long time, the Brazilian art critics that analyzed Wanda Pimentel’s work placed her outside the experimentalism and political contestations that characterized much of the country’s conceptual output during the 1960s and 70s. Highlighting her specificities, these readings tended to associate her with either Brazilian constructivism or North-American new figuration and pop art. More recently, however, the lyrical silence, mystery, stillness and ambivalent figuration that are so strong in Pimentel’s art have seen her reconsidered and repositioned within the context of Brazilian political art and the feminist debate.

The pieces on-show at Frestas are paintings and reliefs in wood produced during the 60s and 70s, many of them from the series Envolvimento [Involvement]. For the critic Fernando Cocchiarale, this series signaled not only the beginning and direction for Pimental’s career, but also her political identity. The selection on exhibition evinces both a private repertoire and ongoing dialogues with local and foreign artistic movements. These interfaces endow Pimentel’s work with certain attributes, such as a planar spatial arrangement; a graphic feel and saturated tones; a figurative ambiguity of interiors, bodies and objects; and a representation that tensions the naturalized connection between everyday domesticity and the feminine universe.

[F.B.]