Helios Gómez: commitment and historical memory

The art of Helios Gómez has become a memory and testimony of an era, and now, thanks to the donation of his son, the MNAC has received an important set of his work, a contribution that will help to better understand Gómez's career and its context, from his early stages to the post-war period.

The loaned collection includes six oil paintings, twenty-seven drawings and a book, all from the artist's personal collection, one of the most important collections that until now was kept in private hands. To this set are added three oils that were already on deposit at the museum and that have now been formally acquired: Evacuation , Agre andalús and Dolor aerotransportat (parachutes with an eye) , permanently exhibited in the rooms dedicated to Surrealism and the Civil War.

Born in Seville in 1905 and settled in Barcelona, Helios Gómez was a painter, but he also worked as a poster artist, poet and activist, being one of the most prominent voices of the graphic and political avant-garde. Self-defined as a gypsy, anarchist and anti-Stalinist communist, he was part of the Union of Illustrators of Catalonia and used art as a tool of denunciation. He experienced the political events of his time intensely and, during the Civil War, he actively participated in the republican struggle, combining his work as a soldier with artistic and propagandistic production. One of his best-known projects is the Gypsy Chapel in the Model prison in Barcelona, a work that he painted while serving his sentence between 1945 and 1954 and which is currently in the process of being restored.

Helios Gómez in front of one of his posters. MNAC

The works lent to the MNAC show a Helios Gómez in full creative maturity, especially in the paintings of the 1940s and 1950s. Moving away from the synthetic strokes and ink graphics that made him famous during the 1930s, these pieces reveal a more complex and introspective language, with surrealist influences and dreamlike visions. An example of this is Desesperació , an oil painting that presents a gypsy prisoner and that seems to reflect the artist's personal experience in prison. Among the most outstanding works is also Transfixió , which demonstrates a symbolic exploration of reality, as well as Tauromaquia abstracta , an experiment with abstraction that was left as a path interrupted by his premature death.

Transfixion, Helios Gómez (1947). MNAC

Beyond the paintings, the donation includes three gouaches from the 1920s. Far from his best-known style, these pieces on paper play with unusual chromaticism and influences ranging from Matisse to Art Deco, showing a more experimental side. You can also find a series of Chinese ink drawings about the Civil War, included in the series Horrors of War , with images such as those of a bombing in a school or refugees hiding in the Barcelona metro. The set is completed with other pencil and ink drawings, some of them still to be studied and documented.

With this incorporation, the MNAC becomes the reference center for the plastic work of Helios Gómez, while reinforcing its discourse on the art of the Civil War and its visual testimonies. The museum's permanent collection already had nearly a hundred pieces by different artists linked to this tumultuous period, but the works of Helios Gómez bring a new dimension to it, especially due to their combative nature and their profound social charge.

Horrors of war. Evacuation, Helios Gómez (1937). MNAC