Wanda Pimentel: Objects of Oppression

A sense of chaos pervades the domestic landscapes glimpsed in Wanda Pimentel’s works. Clothes flung on the floor, smoke rising sinuously from abandoned cigarettes, and cosmetics spilling out of open handbags are some of the haphazard images that fill the late Brazilian artist’s best-known series, Envolvimento (Involvement) (1968-84). Disembodied legs—implicitly feminine—emerge at odd angles, hinting at a human presence while simultaneously objectifying it. Pimentel’s compositions consider our relationship with the objects that we so often consume without thought, begging the question: How do we resist—or submit to—the consumerist nature of modern life?

Born to upper-middle-class parents in Rio de Janeiro in 1943, Pimentel was part of a generation who came of age during the rise of consumer capitalism in Brazil. With artistic movements like Neo-Concretism taking hold in Rio, she enrolled in 1964 in painting classes at the city’s Museum of Modern Art under the abstract artist Ivan Serpa, who had founded the influential Grupo Frente with Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, among others, in the mid-1950s. Unlike her mentor, Pimentel took a representational approach, painting her subjects in Pop Art contours from unexpected perspectives.

The Envolvimento paintings followed (the series largely dates from 1968-69, though Pimentel revisited it intermittently until 1984), taking up similar themes and motifs in a brighter palette. The series offers a more pointed portrayal of women as victims of consumer culture, their bodies literally entangled with household objects. It has also been widely interpreted as a response to the confinements of Brazil’s military dictatorship, during which the arts sector was aggressively censored. Works from Envolvimento were accepted into the 1969 São Paulo Biennial, which went down in history as the “Boycott Biennial” when many artists, including Pimentel, withdrew their participation in protest against the increasingly repressive regime. 

“All the members of this [generation] began their careers under the oppressive force of the dictatorship, so of course this feeling is underscored in Wanda’s work,” said Alexandre Gabriel of the São Paulo-based gallery Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, which began representing Pimentel’s estate in 2021. “But there’s also an overarching feminist aspect in the work, and a lot of autobiographical notes in the images, too. These aren’t self-portraits but portraits of women.”

“People are surprised to learn how little academic work has been done in the United States on that whole generation of Brazilian artists, and it’s because Brazil was still very isolated at the time, even from other art scenes in Latin America,” Gabriel said. “The response to Pop Art in Brazil and South America as a whole was so strong—and many of its key figures were women—but there still hasn’t been a major exhibition specifically focused on that.”

Pimentel emerged as a prominent figure of the Pop-inflected New Figuration movement alongside her classmates Raymundo Colares and Cildo Meireles. This loosely associated group of Brazilian artists moved away from abstraction and toward representational painting in the 1960s. In stark contrast with 20th-century movements that sought to promote a purely Brazilian visual expression, Brazilian Pop was long viewed as a derivative appropriation of American culture.

Yet works by Pimentel and her peers were imbued with uniquely Brazilian sociopolitical concerns. In a 1970 interview with the Jornal do Brasil, Pimentel stated: “The theme of my work is one that directly impacts me as a person who lives in a society based on compulsively consuming. The woman, above all, occupies a very prominent place in consumer society because she is used as an instrument and remains at the margin of a freedom she thinks she possesses. The Brazilian woman finds herself in the situation of being a woman within an underdeveloped country and, therefore, is surrounded by prejudice.”