Helios Gallery

Helios Gallery began, according to its own history, in 1989 with a folding table in Portobello Road market in London¹. The two partners, Rolf von Kiaer and Samantha Neal, met while studying archaeology. Von Kiaer studied Mesopotamian archaeology at the Institute of Archaeology, London, and Neal's main interest is pre-Classical Mediterranean pottery¹. In 1994 they opened a shop in Notting Hill, kept it for eleven years, and ran a smaller outlet in Bath in the 1990s. In 2005 the business became wholly web-based¹. The gallery says it has belonged to the Antiquities Dealers' Association since the 1990s and that von Kiaer has served on its executive committee, and the association's council page lists him as co-founder of Helios Gallery in 1989^5,6.

Greek, Egyptian, Roman and Near Eastern antiquities are on offer alongside the Cypriot ones⁴. In 2026 the Cypriot catalogue showed 26 items for sale at roughly £145 to £2,000, most under £700, and a Cypriot archive lists 70 sold items from the Chalcolithic to Byzantine sgraffito ware^2,3,7. The stock is mostly pottery: Red Polished, White Painted and Base Ring wares, a tulip bowl, an Early Bronze Age pottery horn, Cypro-Geometric and Archaic painted vessels including a Free Field Style jug with birds, and painted warrior and charioteer figurines. Votive limestone heads and a gypsum alabastron are among the sculpture and stone^2,3,7.

Its provenance statements usually name an earlier British or American private collection. The tulip bowl is given as ex Ian Auld collection and as part of lot 316 at Bonhams in 2009, and the pottery horn as ex Desmond Morris collection^2,3. A Geometric bichrome jug is described as bought from the licensed Nicosia dealer Petros Kolokasides and exported in 1975, with a copy of the export licence supplied³. A black-on-red flask and an Archaic amphora in the archive are noted as ex Folio Fine Art⁷.