'Much of his oeuvre reflects a conscious search for a poignant single image, one which would be both true to the specific situation at hand, and one which could serve as a broader visual metaphor relevant to the whole human condition...' Dr Sasha Grishin, catalogue essay, Lives in the Balance, 2001.
					COSMOW (Russia): Oil on Canvas,259 x 168 cm,1998-2000.
	Quote From Review of exhibition : Lives In The Balance, by critic Alex Sudheim : Sth Africa Mail& Guardian arts supplement March 16 –22, 2001, who meet and interviewed the artist at it’s Durban showing: “Australian artist George Gittoes is both a conundrum and an extraordinary synthesis of seemingly paradoxical forces. In his work and his life, Gittoes is simultaneously a modernist, a postmodernist, a social realist, a pop artist and an expressionist…. Gittoes…a modernist….believes the camera has not replaced the artist and it is through the expressive renderings of direct experience of extreme cruelty and mayhem that the artist is able to make a profound statement about the human condition that the passive camera cannot….. We see Gittoes, the post modernist, removing the line between high and low art by according the mass-medium of television equal status as a vehicle for serious artistic ideals as canvas and oils….. …Gittoes, the pop artist, recognizing that if one wants to hit the masses with a message, the bitter pill of the heavy stuff needs to be coated with easily digestible sugar. On this score, Gittoes draws a comparison with Andy Warhol, with whom he was friendly in the United States….. Gittoes himself is a self confessed social realist, an unpopular stance to adopt in the contemporary art world where just about everything is about the sleekness and sophistication of designer abstractions. “My work concentrates on what is beyond myself. I’m not interested in making art about art…” …..His exhibition Lives In The Balance, currently on the South African leg of its around the world trip, is both a visceral expressionistic tour de force and astute comment on the intractable perversions of global politics.”