NAUM GABO (NAUM BORISOVICH PEVSNER)
Briansk (Russia [Currently Belarus]), 1890 –Waterbury (EE.UU.), 1977

His relationship with revolutionary groups made it necessary in 1910 for him to move to Munich, where he embarked on his higher education. After starting with medicine and natural sciences, he finally graduated as an engineer in 1914. He also studied art history with Wölfflin, who encouraged him to visit Italy. In 1912 and 1913 he travelled to Paris, where his brother Antoine was already living; there he discovered the work of the Cubists at first hand.
Although he had no artistic training and a mininum of creative experience, in 1915 he set his signature –as “Gabo”- to his first Constructivist works, not modelled from a mass but consisting of an interaction of planes in which the part played by the void was fundamental for the creation of volume. These first experiments were developed in Norway, where he sought refuge at the outbreak of war. With the triumph of the Revolution, he returned to Russia in 1917. After turning down a position as a teacher of ceramics and sculpture in Moscow, he did work for architectural studios. The maturing of his artistic language attained its maximum expressive refinement in the Kinetic Construction of 1919 and its theoretical formulation in the “Realist Manifesto” of 1920, in which he postulated his concept of sculpture in terms of space, time and movement. His work was shown in the first Russische Kunstausstellung in Berlin in 1922, a circumstance of which he took advantage in order to go into exile. In Germany he met Peter Behrens and contributed to the magazine G, at a time when he was conceiving his Constructions in Space as modular experiments that were translated into a variety of architectural projects –a car park, a skyscraper, an office block- that culminated with the design he presented for the Palace of the Soviets in Moscow in 1931. At the same time he also worked with his brother, with whom he exhibited in Paris in 1924 and designed the sets for the ballet La Chatte for Sergei Diaghilev (1926).
He lived in Paris from 1932 to 1936, and then moved to London. There he used mathematical models to develop his concept of spatial constructions by means of the systematic use of transparency in work that he exhibited in 1938. He worked at the Design Research Unit in London, where he produced various designs, including one for a vehicle, none of which were constructed. In 1946 he moved to the United States, where he acquired American nationality in 1952 and where he died on  23/08/1977.