WANDA PIMENTEL

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.