Helios Gómez

The work of Helios Gomez (1905-1956), an important representative of the European artistic avant-garde of the early 20th century, is little known in Germany, although there are important links to Berlin. Born into a Roma family in Seville in 1905, Gomez dedicated himself to art and political activism at an early age: as an anarchist and later as a communist, he fought in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), criticising the political conditions of the time in his newspaper illustrations and revolutionary graphics. His life and work open up a pan-European perspective on the art movement of the time: persecuted by the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera, Gomez went into exile in 1927 – from Paris via Brussels, Amsterdam, Vienna and Moscow to Berlin – where he came into contact with Symbolism, the Dada Constructivists and Soviet Productivism. In all these places, he worked with groups associated with the internationalism of the labour movement, and of all these stops, Berlin was undoubtedly a special one for Gomez. His ‘German Drawings’ were printed in the national and international press. And ‘Ira’, Irene Weber, his girlfriend and companion on his adventures, was also German.

In 1930, the International Labour Association (IIA) in Berlin published his first masterpiece, the album ‘Días de Ira (Days of Wrath)’. In this album, Gomez explicitly presents himself as a Roma (Gitano) and develops his graphics as a means of expression for revolutionary movements, based on the ideas of Frans Masereel.