Word: gabo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...learn to adapt ourselves to the modern situation now, it's the end-and the artist must show us the way." The star and theme setter of the art exhibit, appropriately enough, is that grand old Russian revolutionary and pioneer sculptor of the 1920s, Naum Gabo, 77, with 28 constructions on display. Though the original idea for the festival was Foss's, the planning and expenses are being borne by a dozen different local and state institutions (even Buffalo's bantam-sized 7,800-student state college got in the act by inviting Merce Cunningham...
...Through Gabo and his fellow constructivists, who took over leadership in the 1920s, the movement expanded to influence Germany's Bauhaus and the Dutch exponents of De Stijl. For art historians, the show is endlessly fascinating; no exhibit has attempted to interrelate these different schools since Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art's "Cubism and Abstract Art" in 1936. What makes the Buffalo survey particularly relevant to 1968 is the demonstration that the lineal descendants of constructivism are none other than the kinetic, op and minimal artists of today...
...concept of perfection, but only in the past 40 years have sculptors begun creating works that are literally as clear and pure as air or water. Only in the past five have they successfully built them. For although plastic and glass designs were put together by Constructivist Naum Gabo and the Bauhaus' Laszlo Moholy-Nagy back in the 1920s, their results amounted to little more than experiments, designed to illustrate the constructivist tenet that space plays as vital a role in sculpture as mass. It remained for a myriad of advanced synthetics and plastics to make see-through sculpture...
...Gabo's sculptures are frequently made from translucent plastic, phosphor bronze or glass; the shape is usually a swooping arc, strung with taut wire or string, like a harp, that forms a delicate open-sided cage for space. Their construction has been likened to architecture, their humming strings to music, their balance to mathematics...
...Gabo does not like them to be called abstract, says: "They don't belong to an ideal world of concepts and mathematical calculations." Far from a turning away from nature, he feels that his work seeks to penetrate if more profoundly. "I am trying," he says, "to tell the world in this frustrated time of ours that there is beauty in spite of ugliness and horror. I am trying to call attention to the balanced, not the chaotic side of life-to be constructive, not destructive...