Naum (Neemia) Boriosovich Pevsner was born in Bryansk, near Moscow, in 1890. From 1910 to 1913 he studied medicine, science, philosophy and art history in Munich and also travelled to Paris and Italy. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he fled first to Copenhagen and later to Oslo. In 1915 he gave himself the name Gabo. He returned to Russia in 1917. His works became more abstract, and in 1920 he published The Realistic Manifesto together with his brother Antoine Pevsner. Gabo lectured at the Bauhaus in 1928. In 1932 he moved to Paris and joined the artists’ association Abstraction-Création. He moved to the United States in 1946, and taught at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Architecture from 1953 to 1954. He was represented at documenta 1 in Kassel in 1955. In his Constructivist-oriented works Gabo often grappled with the concept of space and with the possibilities surrounding sculpture, and he also created kinetic pieces. He died in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1977.
