George Gittoes: Ukraine Guernica

The outpouring of universal grief prompted by Picasso’s most famous painting, Guernica, has reverberated throughout the world as one of the most powerful anti-war statements since its making in April 1937. Cubism’s most shattering image artistically unleashed by the catastrophic bombing of civilians of the small Basque village during the Spanish Civil War. Nearing a century later, Guernica was to be tragically relived. Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, declared on a live broadcast to Spanish members of parliament: “It's April 2022, but it feels like April 1937, when the world learned about what was happening in one of your cities, Guernica.”

The internationally renowned artist George Gittoes has no qualms in catapulting himself into dangerous, hyperreal war zones. He has been doing this for the last fifty years. The unstoppable Gittoes with his wife and collaborator, artist Hellen Rose, left the haven of their Werri Beach, New South Wales, home soon after the news came in of the Russian invasion into the Ukraine. Central to the war has been Russia’s deliberate attempt to annihilate Ukrainian national and cultural identity—an untenable situation for Gittoes and Rose. Their support and efforts in the Ukraine have culminated in a major exhibition George Gittoes: Ukraine Guernica showing at the Hazelhurst Arts Centre, southern Sydney. The exhibition comprises paintings, drawings, a one-and-a-half-hour documentary film Ukrainistan Artist War, and head-turning collaborative works Gittoes has made with Rose and the Ukrainian artist, Ave Libertatemaveamor. The film depicts the unthinkable atrocities of this war at the everyday ground level we don’t get to see via media bite scrolling, livestream, and news headlines. No surprise then that this is a compelling but hard-hitting exhibition.

Ukrainistan Artist War, 2023, co-produced by Gittoes and Rose, interconnects the paintings and drawings that occupy the space with the despicable truths of war. The music direction by Rose adds gesturally to the film’s depth that is sliced episodically, drawing us into the narratives, the oral histories, the calls of everyday citizens and soldiers living on the edge. The film presses heavily on those who watch it.

In one scene, Gittoes with a haphazardness stretches up a new canvas outside a destroyed ground-floor apartment building in Borodianka. Working outside the confines of the studio is one of the artist’s idiosyncratic visual tropes. He ingests the sounds and tones of the streets besieged by constant bombing that bleeds into his practice. Gittoes says he needs to be “out among people doing work which defies the insanity of this beautiful city.” His visibility invites conversation with passers-by, a normalising counterbalance to the claustrophobic containment of a city under siege. Inside the building was found a white chiffon dress. “This is the small girl’s party dress that was hung outside a children’s bedroom by their grandmother to let the Russians know there were children inside,” Gittoes says. Alas, a warning sign that did not deter a Russian missile hitting inside this apartment. In the film, Rose movingly sings a lullaby to the spirits of those children who lost their lives in the bombing.

Viewing it in the exhibition, I imagined a sweeping gusto sound that echoed from the top of this painting titled House Where Children Lived, 2022, as the party dress towered upwards melding into the empty, destroyed apartment blocks where this innocent young girl once lived. The exuberant gestural brushstrokes, swirling white with black outline, propagate the dress against the blue skies in mid-air as if levitating to the heavens. In its transformative effects the dress is symbolic of the redemptive virtues of survival, hope, and peace Gittoes transpires.

Hope and renewal are revisited in the work All Things Must Pass, 2023. The painting, created in the House of Culture at Irpin, takes its title from George Harrison’s 1970 solo album. It shows the ashes and rubble of an interior stairwell and windows with smashed broken glass protruding. The painting is ablaze with impasto rich layers of paint that drip, swirl, cascade, break away. The strong black, pink, white, and greyish palette evokes the feel and look of rubble. The artist encounters detritus at every waking turn. Listening to George Harrison’s music gives Gittoes a sense of time slipping away. Quiet moments of reflection. A pigeon gleams at the high point of the painting as it’s about to take flight through the smashed windows. “I have been opposing war for over fifty years, and for my Ukrainian friends their war seems endless. I painted the pigeon to represent our hopes for peace knowing ‘all things must pass.’”

The rubble and “ashes everywhere” that Gittoes describes calls to mind the mythology of the phoenix rising from the ashes, which Gittoes also refers to in the film. This idea of casting new growth encapsulates what Hellen Rose’s hauntingly imaginative performance did to revive the House of Culture. “My way of confronting the destruction that I have witnessed is to use the ancient ritual magic of performance art.”

Gittoes and Ave Libertatemaveamor joined artistic forces in the monumental production of the mural Kiss of Death, 2022, created on the outside wall of the House of Culture at Irpin. Conceived as a revival of the pre-invasion times where art and culture flourished in the Ukraine, the black and white graphics call to mind Gittoes’ German expressionist-inspired etchings of the 1970s held in the Art Gallery of New South Wales collection. The mural impudently depicts Putin as a hideous insect-like creature clumsily kissing his contortionist lover, grossly “feeding off each other.” Its formalistic blueprint has been compared to Picasso’s Guernica, which the artists find amusing but enjoy hearing from locals. A significant collaboration envisaged as lasting Gittoes’ lifetime, he and Libertatemaveamor have recently finished a graphic novel of the same title.

So often with major exhibitions like this that have extraordinary multifaceted dialectic pathways, not enough attention is given to resourcing them satisfactorily. George Gittoes: Ukraine Guernica would have benefitted with the appointment of a curator throughout this exhibition to reveal more of the nuanced juxtapositions not readily available.

Gittoes’ unconventional approach working independently without the instructional constraints of those in power forges in places of conflict. It is in his nature to see how art can uphold the spirit and charge forward on the battlefields. Fortunately, Gittoes admits he does not wrestle with demons at night; he is seasoned to the impact of horrific war crimes, and like most cultural workers operating in war zones, he and Rose take up other lines of duty that keep the situation hopeful.

Guernica has returned to haunt us all as we walk through this heart-of-darkness, not-to-be-bypassed exhibition. Gittoes will go down in the annals of art and cultural history, an Australian anti-war artist not to be overlooked.

This review was originally published in Artist Profile, issue 67

EXHIBITION
George Gittoes: Ukraine Guernica 
30 April – 23 June 2024
Hazelhurst Arts Centre, NSW