Wanda Pimentel, Brazilian Artist of Feminist Pop Canvases, Dead at 76

Wanda Pimentel, the Brazilian Pop artist whose feminist-inflected canvases were included in the lauded recent exhibition “Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985,” died on December 23 in Rio de Janeiro. The news was confirmed by her gallerist Anita Schwartz.

Pimentel is best known for her “Envolvimento” series, which she worked on intensely in the late 1960s and continued until 1984. A selection of 27 such works (whose title translates to “entanglement” or “involvement”) were the subject of a solo exhibition at the Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) in 2017, as part of the museum’s Year of Sexuality exhibitions.

The works are seemingly innocuous interior scenes of bedrooms, living rooms, kitchens, all painted in a distinctly Pop style in muted reds, yellows, greens, blues, and blacks. But each scene contains a pair of white legs poking out from the edge of the canvas. In one, an open handbag filled with makeup and other things sits on the lap of an unidentified subject (presumably Pimentel).