In Studio: George Gittoes
A celebrated rabble-rouser and adrenaline junkie returns to his home town on a mission to "capture the beast" that is Sydney
By Angus Fontaine
Gittoes and the first sensual fruits of his return to Sydney
See inside George Gittoes' House of Heaven & Hell
After years filming, painting and leading Death a merry dance in the world's worst battlefields, maverick artist George Gittoes is back in town packing "a giant hard-on for Sydney".
The Rockdale boy, official war artist, and acclaimed film-maker has come home to set up the second coming of Sydney bohemia from a Surry Hills studio and "base camp" he's named The House of Heaven & Hell.
"For 40 years I've moved between artistic hotbeds in New York and Berlin and war zones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Bosnia, but I'm now turning my full focus on Sydney and prowling her streets night and day like a hunter," Gittoes told Time Out.
Gittoes was a founder of Sydney's historic Yellow House - an avant garde confederacy of artists who turned every wall, floor and ceiling of a Kings Cross terrace into a piece of living art - and evolved into one of the nation's finest figurative painters, winning the Wynne art prize for landscape and the Blake for religious art in 1992 and again in 1995.
Of late he's become more famous as the cage rattling auteur behind Soundtrack to War (2005), Rampage (2006) and, later this year, the third in this stunning trilogy in which, he says, "I've tried to wage a war on war using creativity instead of bullets."
The Miscreants has Gittoes head-to-headless with Al Qaeda and the Taliban in a shock-documentary already being touted for Oscar honours. But with a final edit just days away, the 59-year-old is already fast forwarding to his next epic: a film about Sydney.
"When I left for New York to work with Andy Warhol in 1968, Sydney was dead as a doornail," says Gittoes. "But now Sydney's reached a level of adulthood. It's not quite Blade Runner but it's got an Impressionistic edge that has me half-expecting to see Marlene Dietrich in Blue Angel mode at the Hotel Hollywood.
Hence this new gush of wildly erotic nudes exclusively shown here: art Gittoes says was initiated in a studio in Peshawar, inspired by a love of Islamic calligraphy and executed by Indian brushes for Sydney Biennale.
He grins. "My Sydney is a sleazy, sparkling city full of dark gems."
See inside George Gittoes' House of Heaven & Hell
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