RIO DE JANEIRO.-
Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Wanda Pimentel – Percurso em preto e branco [Path in black and white], opening on August 16th at Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro. The show brings together the Black and White Animals series, a group of early black-and-white drawings for the first time. Created between 1965 and 1967, this body of work offers rare insight into a formative period of experimentation, marking the emergence of Pimentel’s distinct visual language.
Using anxious, vigorous lines and a restricted palette, Pimentel drew animals, some identifiable, others invented, whose forms pulse, meander, and buzz among graphic tangles of squiggles and markings. Beetles, kangaroos, armadillos, turtles, bats, giraffes, owls, and monkeys appear, rendered in an inquisitive hand, as if the artist were exploring the textures of fur, feathers, scales, and prints, only to distort their shapes and patterns into the hallucinatory environments of her stylized bestiary.
This earlier facet of Pimentel’s oeuvre reveals a more unbound calligraphic approach, in which the surface of the paper is almost entirely occupied, bristling with visual activity, a sharp contrast to her later geometrically oriented output, which relied on a rigorous spatiality defined by empty space in tandem with hard-edged depictions of objects and limbs. As art historian Vera Beatriz Siqueira proposes in her essay for the exhibition, “In Wanda, animals seem to affirm the graphic basis and central position afforded to the line, defining issues in her oeuvre, while simultaneously heralding the thematic and plastic question of “involvement”, relationships between creatures, objects and their environments, central to her work
The artist’s Untitled (from the Envolvimento series) (1969) was recently included in the MoMA’s permanent collection and was featured in the exhibition Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, organized by Lanka Tattersall in 2024 at the same institution. Pimentel is currently on view in Pop Brasil: Vanguarda e Nova Figuração, 1960-70, at Pinacoteca in São Paulo, Brazil.
Wanda Pimentel (1943–2019), born and based in Rio de Janeiro, developed a distinct artistic practice marked by precise geometric forms and smooth, hard-edge surfaces that blur the lines between abstraction and figuration. Her depictions of domestic interiors and everyday objects in the late 1960s and early 1970s emerged in parallel with Brazil’s military dictatorship. Her work responds to this repressive context, subtly critiquing the isolating effects of authoritarian rule, conservative social values, and fractured national identity. This sense of isolation also reflects the gendered constraints of Brazilian society and the country's peripheral role in global art discourse. Though visually resonant with Pop Art, Pimentel’s use of synthetic aesthetics carries a darker, more ambivalent tone, challenging the easy assimilation of industrial imagery typical of the genre’s Northern iterations.
Wanda Pimentel has works in important public collections, such as MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; MAC – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Niterói, Brazil; MALBA – Museu Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina; MASP - Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil; MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
