Naum Gabo 
 Square Relief, 1937
Plexiglas on aluminium, anodised aluminium base44.5 x 44.5 x 16 cm 
The work of Naum Gabo (Klimovichi, Russia, 1890 – Waterbury, CT, United States, 1977) is characterised by its profoundly experimental nature, as can be seen in the fact that many of his works were conceived and made at different times and in different settings, something that was also due to the vicissitudes of his personal life. He lived in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, London, New York, Rotterdam and Oslo, among other places. Born as Naum Neemia Pevsner, he is considered one of the most outstanding figures of the Constructivist movement and of non-objective art, not only in the Russian avant-garde but also in the international panorama in the first half of the twentieth century.
He belonged to a family of engineers, but he and his brother, Antoine Pevsner, chose to train to be artists. While studying medicine at Munich University (1911 and 1913) he also attended classes on philosophy and art history. When the First World War broke out he moved to Copenhagen, and, setting out from the principles of destruction and ruin that he recognised in Cubism, he began his Constructivist experiments and formulated his stereometric method. It was a way of moving towards a new conception of sculpture that went beyond the principles of carving and modelling.
After the revolution in 1917, Gabo decided to move to Moscow. There he worked in the All Russia Central Exhibitions Bureau and for Izo (the Visual Arts Department in the People’s Commissariat of Education), and he taught in the Svomas, the Free State Art Workshops, which in 1920 were converted into the Vkhutemas, the Higher Art and Technical Workshops. His ideas were close to the principles of Constructivism, he defended the practice of “laboratory” art based on experimentation with forms and materials, and he began to work with metal, glass and plastic. In fact, he made very many works in his career as an artist, but underlying them all there are about a hundred designs, because they are variations and experiments with forms and materials and with construction methods (stereometric method, kinetic construction, moving objects, strings, lines, etc.). Gabo maintained that every material had its qualities and properties, and therefore the material imposed the way of working with it. He also shared with the Constructivists the principle that a work of art is a model or maquette for a project on a larger scale, thus indicating the relationship between architecture and sculpture in terms of space and volume.
It was in this context that Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner wrote their “Realistic Manifesto” (1920). In it they proclaimed the five points of Constructivist creation and technique, which they maintained throughout their careers. The aspects that they attacked in it were colour, described as an accidental factor, the graphic value of the line (although they were in favour of the line as direction), volume as a plastic form of space, and mass as an element of sculpture.
When Gabo took part in the exhibition Erste Russische Kunstausstellung in Berlin (1922), he moved to that city and embarked on a new period in his career. He concentrated on constructions that reflected the new constitution of a world subjected to radical changes as a result of scientific advances, and he abandoned pure abstraction. He came into contact with other artists in the field of Constructivism and non-objective art, such as Kurt Schwitters and Hans Richter; he went to the Bauhaus in Dessau to give some lectures; he made set and costume designs for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes production of La chatte (1927); and in 1931 he was invited to take part in the competition of designs for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow. With the deterioration of the political climate after the end of the Weimar Republic, in 1932 he decided to move to Paris. He stayed there until the end of 1936, living very modestly and hardly exhibiting, and he had close links with the artists of the Abstraction-Création group.
After moving to England, where he lived from 1936 to 1946, he embarked on a collective project that led to the creation of a journal, Circle (1937), established as a platform to bring together artists from various disciplines who were working with Constructivist and non-figurative language. The result was a single volume, a collective publication profusely illustrated and accompanied by two texts by Gabo, “The Constructive Idea in Art” and “Sculpture: Carving and Construction in Space”, among others. In that context he made Square Relief, a work in which we find the principles enunciated in those texts, together with other aspects developed in much earlier constructions. On the one hand, Gabo set out from the premise that art is not concerned with representing the world but instead originates from a need to communicate and to announce; therefore it does not use abstract language and instead employs absolute forms that come from elements that exist in nature and whose content is in it. On the other hand, as he had already declared in his manifesto in 1920, Gabo differentiated between volume of mass and volume of space, considering space as an absolute sculptural element and therefore one that also constructs.
Square Relief derives from the application of the stereometric method to sculpture – the sectioning and measuring of solid bodies – and from his exercises with curvilinear and helicoidal forms in the 1920s, with which he broke away from the conventions of up and down, left and right; and through the value of transparency he eliminated the idea of inner or outer volume from sculpture. This work also belongs to the experiments of the Spheric Theme series. Working with plastic, glass or perspex, he takes two flat semi-circumferences with displaced centres as starting points and gives a prominent role to the radial element that each of them draws when it is projected on an inclined plane. The result is an open volume, a construction in space, in which the curved lines act as vectors that describe and activate an endless cycle.

References
Natalia Sidlina: Naum Gabo. Tate Publishing, London, 2012.
Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder: Constructing Modernity. The Art and Career of Naum Gabo. Yale University Press, New Haven / London, 2000.
Martin Hammer and Christina Lodder (eds.): Gabo on Gabo. Artists Bookworks, Forest Row, 2000.