Naum Gabo (Bryansk (Russia), 1890 - Waterbury (Connecticut), 1977) was a Russian-American constructivist sculptor. Space played an important role in his work. He tried to add volume to his images by working with different layers. Besides sculptures, Gabo also made kinetic objects, such as mobiles. Gabo, whose original name was Pevsner, visited Paris in 1910 and came into contact with avant-garde artists, including Wassily Kandinsky. In 1915 (during the First World War) Gabo made his first constructivist work. During the years 1922 - 1932 he stayed in Berlin, where he taught at the Bauhaus in 1928. He then moved to England and finally moved to America in 1946. He became a citizen and lived there until his death in 1977.
Gabo is one of the founders of modern sculpture. Instead of wood, stone and bronze, he used new industrial materials such as plexiglass and plastic. Mass and volume - the pillars of traditional sculpture - have given way to transparency and an apparent weightlessness in his abstract, spatial constructions. But what makes Gabo above all 'modern' is that he chose not nature but concepts from the exact sciences as a source of inspiration for his art.
