DOORWAYS - George Gittoes Solo Exhibition

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DOORWAYS

2 May - 22 June 2024

I was a post war baby, born in 1949 and grew up at 39 Villiers St Rockdale. I had wonderfully supportive parents. My dad, Claude, caught the train into the city every day to work at the Department of Main Roads to help finance our artistic dreams. My grandmother was an artist. She white enamel-top table in her kitchen which she encouraged me to draw on and when I had finished, she would critique it and then wipe it away with a dishcloth. That is how my passion for drawing started. My mum was very bohemian and had her own ceramic studio. We often collaborated to make surrealist sculptures.

I won a scholarship to Sydney University in 1967 and studied fine Arts, Our esteemed Professor, Bernard Smith invited the American Arts Writer, Cement Greenberg to give the first Power Lecture. Bernard showed my minimalist abstract

paintings to Greenberg who was impressed enough to invite me to come to New York in 1968, I befriended Andy Warhol and experienced his Factory but was more influenced by the great African American Artist Joseph Delaney who took me under his wing and turned me away from pure abstraction and back to portraying humanity. When I returned to Australia, I helped to create the Yellow House, between 1970 and 1972 in Sydney’s Potts Point, with Martin Sharp. I installed a Mosque like puppet theatre in a second floor room (I had been doing puppet shows since I was a kid in Rockdale). It was the Protest Era and I was passionately opposed to the Vietnam War. When the Yellow House finished Martin said ,“We should have done this in Vietnam.” I agreed but neither of us knew how. I have spent much of the rest of my life finding ways to create in the face of the destruction of war.

My first antiwar documentary was BULLETS OF THE POETS, made in Nicaragua in 1986 about the women poets of the Sandinista Revolution. Since then I have been a withness to war in the Philippines 1989, Somali and Cambodia 1993, Western Sahara, Israel/Palestine, Southern Lebanon and South Africa 1994 , Rwanda and Mozambique 1995, Bosnia 1996 , Northern Ireland 1997, ,Tribal Belt of Pakistan and Afghanistan 1999 , Congo, Moscow, Bougainville and East Timor 2000, Gaza and Hebron 2001, New York 2001-2 , Iraq 2003-4 ,Segregated Brownsub Miami 2006 , Southside Chicago 2018, Ukraine 2022. Note: All these dates are for my first-time arrival in these war zones but I have kept returning to them, repeatedly.

I established the Yellow House creative centre in Jalalabad in 2011 with my wife and fellow artist ,Hellen Rose. The Yellow House has continued to grow and function under Taliban Rule. Our aim is to prove that Art and empathic communication can win where war has failed. From 2022 to 2024 Hellen and I have been committed to Ukraine and Afghanistan spending more time there than at home at Werri Beach.

Since 1976 I have made films parallel to my painting and drawing practice. They include ‘Soundtrack to War’ (Iraq), ‘Rampage’ (Miami), ‘Miscreants of Taliwood’ (Tribal Belt of Pakistan) , ‘Love City’ and ‘Snow Monkey’ (Afghanistan), ‘White Light’ and ‘No Bad Guys’ ( Southside Chicago) and ‘Ukraine Guernica’ (Ukraine) .

I was Awarded a Member of the Order of Australia 1997 and the Sydney Peace Prize 2015. I am a Winner of the Wynne 1993 Prize and twice winner of the Blake Prize 1992 and 1995. Honoured by a Residency at the Central Academy Fine Arts Beijing 1998.