Naum Gabo, born Naum Neemia Pevsner (1890 – 1977), Russian sculptor, architect, theorist, teacher, and a pioneer of Kinetic Art.

Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father owned a metal works. Gabo changed his name to avoid confusion with his elder brother and fellow Constructivist artist Antoine Pevsner.

He was a fluent speaker and writer of German, French, and English in addition to his native Russian.

Gabo entered Munich University in 1910, shortly studying medicine, natural sciences, and art history. In 1912 he transferred to an Engineering school in Munich where he met Wassily Kandinsky and discovered abstract art.

In 1914 joined his brother Antoine (who by then was an established painter) in Paris. Gabo’s engineering training was key to the development of his sculptural work that often used machined elements. During this time he won acclamations by many critics and awards like the Logan Medal of the arts.

After the outbreak of World War I, Gabo moved to Norway making his first constructions under the name Naum Gabo in 1915. These constructions in cardboard or wood were figurative such as the Head No.2 in the Tate collection.

At the end of the revolution in 1917, he moved back to Russia, to become involved in politics and art, spending five years in Moscow with his brother Antoine.

With his brother Pevsner he wrote the Realist Manifesto (1920), which proposed that new concepts of time and space be incorporated into works of art and that dynamic form replace static mass.

His sculptural experiments with constructivism, a movement he helped found, were often transparent, geometrical abstractions composed of plastics and other materials. Gabo’s art conflicted with Soviet art directives.

In 1922 he left Moscow for Berlin, where he taught at the Bauhaus. During this period he realised a design for a fountain in Dresden.

Gabo and Antoine Pevsner had a joint exhibition at the Galerie Percier, Paris in 1924 and the pair designed the set and costumes for Diaghilev’s ballet La Chatte (1926) that toured to Paris and London.
Brothers stayed in Paris during the rise of the Nazis in Germany, also becoming members of the Abstraction-Creation group with Piet Mondrian.

Gabo settled in London in 1936, where he found a sympathy for his abstract art, later moving to United States.
The essence of Gabo’s art was the exploration of space, depicting the volume of a figure without carrying its mass. He also claimed that the art needed to exist actively in four dimensions including time.

In his work, Gabo used time and space as construction elements and in them solid matter unfolds and becomes beautifully surreal and otherworldly. His sculptures initiate a connection between what is tangible and intangible, between what is simplistic in its reality and the unlimited possibilities of intuitive imagination.

In 1957 he executed a huge public monument in Rotterdam.