Helga Goetze

{{Short description|German artist, writer and free love activist}}

{{Infobox artist

| name = Helga Goetze

| image = Helga Goetze.jpg

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| birth_name = Helga Sophia Goetze

| birth_date = {{Birth date|df=y|1922|03|12}}

| birth_place = Magdeburg, Weimar Republic

| death_date = {{death date and age|df=y|2008|01|29|1922|03|12}}

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Helga Sophia Goetze (12 March 1922 – 29 January 2008) was a German artist, writer and free love activist. Her works included embroidery, paintings and poetry.

Life

Helga Goetze was born in 1922 in Magdeburg. She lived there until the beginning of World War II, when her family moved to Hamburg. She married in 1942 and subsequently had seven children.{{cite web|url=http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/ficken-ist-frieden.807.de.html?dram:article_id=121274|title=Ficken ist Frieden|trans-title=Fucking is freedom|first=Christopher|last=Richter|date=13 January 2012|publisher=Deutschlandfunk|accessdate=25 February 2016|language=German}} In 1968, on a trip to Sicily, she met a Sicilian lover with whom she said she experienced her first orgasm; this inspired her to leave her husband, join the free love movement, and live in a variety of communes and shared apartments.{{cite web|url=http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/nachrufe/helga-goetze-geb-1922/1171802.html|title=Helga Götze (Geb.1922)|first=Elena|last=Senft|language=German|work=Der Tagesspiegel|date=22 February 2008|accessdate=25 February 2016}}

Work

From the late 1960s onwards, Goetze embroidered hundreds of canvases, most featuring images of genitalia and female sexuality, and some depicting scenes from the Christian Bible and other religious texts. She also painted works depicting her Sicilian lover and her ex-husband, and wrote over 3000 poems. In 1982, she moved from Hamburg to Berlin, where she was known to sit in front of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church or TU Berlin every day with a sign that read "Ficken ist Frieden" ("Fucking is peace").{{cite web|url=http://www.artbrut.ch/en/21004/1010/authors/goetze--helga|title=Goetze, Helga|publisher=Collection de l'art brut|accessdate=25 February 2016|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160303150252/http://www.artbrut.ch/en/21004/1010/authors/goetze--helga|archive-date=3 March 2016|url-status=dead}}

She appeared in Rosa von Praunheim's films Red Love (1982) and City of Lost Souls (1983) with Jayne County.{{cite web |title=City of Lost Souls (1983) |url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0084724/?ref_=fn_al_tt_2 |publisher=imdb.com |accessdate=19 July 2018}}

Collections and exhibits

A collection of her embroidery is displayed at the Collection de l'art brut museum in Lausanne; a biographical commentary published by the museum notes that Goetze's combination of embroidery and sexual imagery "proclaims women's sexual liberation via a technique that was once the symbol of their subjection". Her embroidery has also been exhibited in the Berlin gallery Wonderloch Kellerland.