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 showing at the Hazelhurst Arts Centre, southern Sydney. The exhibition comprises paintings, drawings, a one-and-a-half-hour documentary film , 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.
