Alberto Pitta’s work is centered on textile printing and serigraphy, although he has also dedicated himself to painting and sculpture in recent years. With a career spanning more than four decades, Alberto Pitta’s production is closely linked to popular festivities and in dialogue with other languages, such as fashion and dance, his work has a strong public dimension, having created prints for Afro carnival blocks such as Olodum, Filhos de Gandhy and his own, Cortejo Afro.

His print production began in the 1980s. They feature signs, shapes and strokes that evoke traditional African and Afro-diasporic elements, especially those from Yoruba mythology, which is very present in Salvador and the Bahian recôncavo. In the words of curator Renato Menezes: “In fact, signs, shapes and lines that evoke traditional African graphics have found, on their fabrics, a privileged place for educating the masses and telling stories that only make sense collectively. If the writing in Pitta’s work is organized in the set of patterns and colors that reinterpret the Yoruba worldview, the reading, on the other hand, concerns the relationship established in the contact between bodies in movement, when the city streets become a terreiro. Through the folds of the fabrics that cover the revellers runs an alphabet of letters and affections, mobilized by music and dance: it is in the body of the other that the text that completes us is read.”

Alberto Pitta was born in 1961. He lives and works in Salvador, Brazil.