Born in Gibraltar where he studied Electronic Engineering before moving to London in 1973 to study Electronic Music composition at Morley College. He was appointed Town Artist for Peterborough Development Corporation in 1978 attaining International prominence for the introduction of art in public places. In 1985 he took up the post of Sandwell Town Artist developing an innovative public art programme which earned him a Royal Town Planning Institute award for “a significant contribution to Town Planning in the West Midlands”. In 1991 Gomila founded the pro- active artist company Fine Rats International whose night-time exhibitions in residual urban spaces(such as the legendary ‘Under Spaghetti Junction’ held over a two-night period, under the infamous motorway junction in Birmingham,)attracted mass audiences and two nominations from the National Arts Collection Fund for an outstanding contribution to the Visual Arts. Fine Rats exhibitions took place in a time-based frame at the forefront of ‘live art’, from which emerged a multi-disciplinary form of working incorporating performance, slide projection, film, video, and sound composition within the sculptural installations. Over this period Gomila explored the deployment of lens-based media as sculptural form: “In my view the digital revolution perfectly illustrates Duchamp’s“infra-thin”(the space between two sides of a single sheet of paper)enabling a permeable boundary,through which the digital image becomes sculptural in its own right”. In 1993 he was invited to co-direct Carta Blanca Madrid, which led to a series of influential exhibitions including, “ALMADRABA” an international site-specific exhibition on both shores of the Straits of Gibraltar (Tangiers, Algeciras&Gibraltar) “Colisiones” (exhibition & artists master classes)at ARTELEKU San Sebastian Spain & “BULL” exploring contemporary artists’ responses to bullfighting.
