Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel is delighted to present a selection of works by Wanda Pimentel at Independent 20th Century 2023. One of the leading voices of the New Figuration movement, Wanda Pimentel was an essential figure in understanding the narratives around Brazilian and Latin American art and global feminisms in the 1960s and 1970s. Pimentel was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, where she lived until her death in 2019.
Pimentel's practice is distinguished by a precise, hard-edge quality encompassing geometric lines and smooth surfaces in pieces that often defy categorization as abstract or figurative. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, her paintings depicted domestic spaces and everyday objects in bright colors, in stylistic alignment with Brazilian new figuration, which ran parallel to international artistic movements such as pop art and nouveau realisme. Her series Envolvimento [Involvement] (1968 – 1984) dates from this period and questions women's role in a consumer society; cropped images of female feet and legs are placed in oppressive interior spaces filled with objects like menacing hairdryers, kettles and sewing machines.
The beginning of the artist's trajectory coincides with the onset of a long period of oppression and state-sponsored violence in Brazil after 1964, when the military dictatorship was instituted. The parallel highlights how her work both reacts to and undermines the stifled atmosphere felt throughout this period, marked by increasingly insular communities and steep political barriers. Pimentel's work serves as a map to ressignifying isolation.
Envolvimento [Involvement] synthesizes a cloistered spatiality in which household appliances mingle with fragments of legs and feet. Pimentel's attention to the mute things that shape our daily habitation manifests mischievous complicity with the paraphernalia of domestic space, while the ghostly body parts positioned throughout imply a female presence as an operator and witness to technological devices. As metaphors of imprisonment, the Envolvimento paintings also insinuate a latent erotic dimension in puddles of water, overflowing sinks, and toilet paper rolls (Untitled, 1969) – vestiges of upheaval among strictly ordered spaces. Fire hydrants (Hydrant, 1969) and umbrellas (Untitled, 1968) convey a latent wetness that contrasts with the bright, solid colors and severe geometric juxtapositions.
In the works from the Path To The Superhuman Tie series (1965-1966), the artist combines ball-point pen, felt-tip marker, watercolor and collage, techniques whose heterogeneous effects on the pictorial surface differ from the uniform finish of the vinyl paint she will later use. The ubiquitous presence of feet in leisurely positions – either dangling in the air or lounging horizontally – contrasts with the fractured space conjured through incompatible perspectives, framing devices and striped patterns superimposed over the image.
The late painting Roupa/Clothing (1996) marks a period during which Pimentel refined her pictorial palette and use of figurative elements, dedicating herself to even stricter lines. Pimentel composes complex spatial relations on the right side of the surface with a fence winding through black and gray beams. This architectural rigor is set against a mass of clothes whose vibrant palette is radically contrasted with the somber browns, grays and blacks. An intimate, almost clandestine dimension is set up, another patch of narrative in the impersonal urban environment the artist pieces together, implying passage, transit, openings and suspense.
The selection of works bears Pimentel's critical painterly response to Brazil's visual and political landscape. Its formal and pictorial qualities and the latent restlessness imprinted on the topics addressed point to a remarkable convergence with contemporary issues in art.
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Recent shows of Pimentel's work include Wanda Pimentel: Os Anos Noventa, Fortes D'Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo, Brazil (2022); Wanda Pimentel, MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil (2020) and Envolvimentos, MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil (2017). Her works appeared in the group shows Mulheres Radicais: Arte Latino-Americana, 1965-1980, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2018); _Radical Women: Latin-American Art 1965-1980, The Brooklyn Museum, Nova York, USA / Hammer Los Angeles, UA (2017) and_International Pop, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA / Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas USA (2016).
Wanda Pimentel has works in important public collections, such as The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, USA; 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 and MAC – Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Niterói, Niterói, Brazil and MALBA – Museu Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina;
Location
Cipriani South Street
10 South Street, New York, NY 10004