Wanda 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. In the following decades, the artist introduced the surrounding Carioca landscape into her formal arrangement, depicting mountains and vistas seen from a window-like frame; she constructed sculptures of manhole covers, directing her gaze downward into hidden environments and painted sequences of geometrically rendered animals, widening her scope to include nonhuman figures. 

The beginning of Pimentel’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 and took hold through 1985. The parallel highlights how her work both reacts to and undermines the stifled atmosphere felt throughout so-called “years of lead”, marked by increasingly insulated communities, conservative societal values, steep political barriers and a turbulent relationship to national identity. In this sense, Pimentel’s work functions as a visual code wrought under oppressive conditions as much as a map toward resignifying isolation. 

Recent shows of Pimentel’s work include Percurso em preto e branco, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel | Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2025); 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) e Envolvimentos, MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil (2017). The artist had works in the group shows Pop Brasil: vanguarda e nova figuração, 1960 -70, Pinacoteca, São Paulo, Brazil (2025); Vital Signs: Artists and the Body, MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, Nova York, USA (2024); Composições Para Tempos Insurgentes, MAM – Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2021) ; Radical Women: Latin American Art, 1960–1985, Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA (2018), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, USA (2017); Mulheres Radicais: Arte Latino-Americana, 1965-1985, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil (2018); and International Pop, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA (2016); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, YSA (2016); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA;  (2015). 

Wanda Pimentel has works in important public collections, such as MoMA – The Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; 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.