Naum Gabo

Prof. Erik Andreasen, Copenhagen (acquired from the artist by 30th January 1970)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in July 1985

Copenhagen, Glyptotek, Abstract Art in a Danish Private Collection, 1982

Herbert Read & Leslie Martin, Gabo: Constructions, Sculpture, Paintings, Drawings, Engravings, London, 1957, nos. 86 & 87, illustration of another version n.p. 
Steven A. Nash & Jörn Merkert, Naum Gabo, Sixty Years of Constructivism, Munich, 1985, no. 55.22, illustrations of a larger version pp. 79 & 122

Apart from a couple of thin surface scratches to the perspex base, this work is in good original condition.
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The present work, one of 26 variants on a theme that Gabo returned to regularly between 1949 and 1976, is a stunning example of the spare, elegant designs that typified the work of an artist successfully bringing abstract art to a three-dimensional form. Naum Gabo's aesthetic is in purposefully stark contrast to the hectic situation in which he found his artistic voice. Born to Jewish Russian parents in Briansk, Gabo studied in Munich but spent time in Paris where he met the 'father of abstraction': Wassily Kandinsky. The Constructivists working in Russia, following the revolution of 1917, were an inspiration to Gabo's œuvre and together with his younger brother, Antoine Pevsner, he wrote the Realistic Manifesto in August 1920.

There is a feeling of lightness and exactness of form in Linear Construction in Space no. 2, brought about by the intricate application of nylon wire around the curved perspex structure. The skeleton of the structure is joined together by a complicated skin of nylon wire - Gabo links all the forms of the piece together through an extremely complex process of artistic production. The simplicity of the concept is Gabo's real success in the present work - an elegant structure being the sum of multifaceted parts.