a visit to Tate St Ives
Naum Gabo: Constructions for Life
Have you a favourite artist who has been a companion to you over the years of your artistic life? Naum Gabo’s sculptures and drawings fascinated me when they appeared in the London art exhibitions in the late 1950s onwards.
What I found different in his work was the focus on the space within the parts of the sculptures which featured nylon thread attached to solid planes. His sculptures showed depth, rather than mass, with lines describing space rather than an object.
In September 2020, I went to Cornwall with my sister to see the extended Naum Gabo retrospective solo exhibition, which was a must for a Gabo acolyte.
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Text and photos supplied by Janet Morton
General view of the Exhibition space and Opus prints
Naum Gabo
Photo by Rudolf Burckhardt ©Nina Williams
The Tate St Ives was very appropriate for a retrospective exhibition because Gabo lived in Cornwall at the start of WW2. With the Newlyn artists, painters like Ben Nicolson and sculptors like Barbara Hepworth, he developed abstract sculptures based on natural forms. Materials varied from traditional stone or wood to modern materials such as Perspex.
The Exhibition Catalogue describes Gabo as a true modernist, who wanted to apply non-objective (abstract) art to cross-cultural activities (Barlow et al, 2020). This exhibition showed the huge range of Gabo’s innovative art, from architectural designs and projects to ballet and public sculpture. He experimented in converting new scientific knowledge in light and rhythm to drawing, sculptures and, later in life, innovative prints.
Gabo was born in 1890 as Naum Neemia Pevsner, the sixth of seven surviving children of a Jewish family in Imperial Russia. His father, Boris, owned a foundry supplying alloys and machinery.