Body Identities Project
Body Identities Outcome
Encounters Project: The Expanded Field
Naum Gabo
1890 - 1977
Naum Gabo 1890-1977
Constructive sculptor and painter. Born in Briansk in Russia, named Naum Pevsner; younger brother of the sculptor Antoine Pevsner. Entered Munich University in 1910, studying first medicine, then the natural sciences; also attended art history lectures by Wölfflin. Transferred in 1912 to an engineering school in Munich. Met Kandinsky and in 1913-14 joined his brother Antoine (then a painter) in Paris. After the outbreak of war moved first to Copenhagen, then Oslo; began to make constructions in 1915 under the name Naum Gabo. 1917-22 in Moscow with Pevsner, Tatlin, Kandinsky and Malevich; wrote and issued jointly with Pevsner in 1920 a Realistic Manifesto proclaiming the tenets of pure Constructivism. Lived 1922-32 in Berlin in contact with the artists of the de Stijl group and the Bauhaus. First one-man exhibition with Pevsner at the Galerie Percier, Paris, 1924. With Pevsner, designed the set and costumes for Diaghilev's ballet La Chatte 1926. 1932-5 in Paris, a member of Abstraction-Creation; 1935-46 in England, first in London, then from 1939 at Carbis Bay in Cornwall. Edited Circle jointly with J.L. Martin and Ben Nicholson in 1937. Moved in 1946 to the USA and settled in 1953 at Middlebury, Connecticut; became a US citizen in 1952. Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture at Harvard University 1953-4. From 1950 onwards carried out several large sculpture commissions, including a sculpture for the Bijenkorf store in Rotterdam 1955-7. Created Hon. KBE 1971. Died at Waterbury, Connecticut.
Published in:
Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery's Collection of Modern Art other than Works by British Artists, Tate Gallery and Sotheby Parke-Bernet, London 1981, p.231
Linear Construction No. 2
1970–1
'Linear Construction No.2' exists in over twenty versions, both standing and hanging. The light-catching nylon filament is wound around two intersecting plastic planes.The stringing gives a delicate sense of three dimensions in the complicated patterns created by the irregular lobe shapes of the transparent plastic. This was one of Gabos favourite works he has produced and it was presented to the Tate in memory of the art historian Herbert Read.
Construction in Space, Suspended
1965
This piece is a model for the suspended form in ‘construction in space, suspended’ 1965. The interior of the model is strung with red threads and the outside with colourless threads. In the inside there is two small versions with colour, one is owned by Nina S. Gabo, It has red and black on the inner edge of the central perspex structure. The other (formerly in the Bernard Reis collection, New York) which has yellow in the same two places, however the other versions are strung with colourless nylon or with metal springs.
Linear Construction No. 3 with Red
1952
The sculpture 'Linear Construction No.3 with Red' was made with plastic and nylon threads, with an aluminium base, it was the subject of an article by A.L. Chanin in Art News, November 1953. The first stage in preparing his works was to make a series of pencil sketches to plot the construction from every angle, then to make several small models. He afterwards made a further version twice the size, with stainless steel springs instead of nylon threads, which belongs to Mrs Miriam Gabo.
My Favourite work created by
Naum Gabo
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt)
1912–1994
Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt) was born on August 1, 1912, to a liberal Jewish banking family in Hamburg, Germany. She studied under Paul Bonatz at the University at Stuttgart, where she graduated with an architecture and engineering degree in 1938. As a student she was influenced by the innovations of the Bauhaus, a creative laboratory of design that operated for over two decades in pre-Hitler Germany. She was forced to leave Germany shortly after finishing her degree and immigrated to Venezuela in 1939. There she worked as a graphic designer and operated her own furniture workshop. She became a Venezuelan citizen in 1952 and lived there for the remainder of her life.
In 1953, Gego began to develop her artistic practice full-time. Encouraged by the support of Alejandro Otero and Jesús Rafael Soto, she began to create three-dimensional works in 1956. During these three years, Gego operated in the margins of the Venezuelan kinetic and op art movements, and continued to study mathematics, architecture, and philosophy. In 1957 Gego participated in the exhibition Arte abstracto en Venezuela and by 1959 the Museum of Modern Art in New York had begun acquiring her work. She lived in New York briefly in 1960 and made several extended visits to the United States until 1967. In New York, she attended the Pratt Institute, where she took engraving and printmaking classes. She also worked in the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles before returning to Venezuela in 1967. For most of her career, she worked at a home studio in Caracas, creating a prolific and varied oeuvre consisting of sculptures and works on paper. She died in Caracas on September 17, 1994.
Recent solo exhibitions of Gego’s work include Gego: Between Transparency and the Invisible, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (2005), and The Drawing Center, New York (2007); Gego: Defying Structures, Museu de Arte Contemporánea de Serralves, Porto; and Gego: Line as Object, Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, and Henry Moore Institute, Leeds (2013). Her work is in the collections of, among others, The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Caracas; Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas; New York Public Library, New York; and Tate Modern, London.
Published in:
Line As Object Exhibition
1957
My Favourite work created
by Gego
The Henry Moore Institute's galleries were dedicated to the work of Gego, an artist who faithfully explored the possibilities of the line as an object. Her delicate, rhizomatically structured objects made of metal and wire challenged the traditional definition of sculpture as an enclosed mass and volume. Gego also pursued transparency and lightness in her numerous works on paper, where she employed lines as objects. Line as Object investigates the artist's unrivalled engagement with the problems of form and space - using light, shadow, scale and gravity in a constant process of discovery.
Tomas Saraceno
1973
After studying art and architecture in Buenos Aires, Frankfurt am Main, and Venice, Tomás Saraceno established his studio in Frankfurt am Main in 2005. The studio relocated to Berlin in 2012 and, after a brief interim, moved into the former administrative building of Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication (AGFA) in Berlin-Rummelsburg. The studio gradually activated and renovated the previously unoccupied building, which was constructed in 1916, and the neighbouring multi-story factory. Studio members from multidisciplinary backgrounds, including designers, architects, anthropologists, biologists, engineers, art historians, curators, and musicians work in the hybrid environment of workshop, office, workshop, the Arachnophilia Research Laboratory and Aerocene community-enthusiasts.
After studying art and architecture in Buenos Aires, Frankfurt am Main, and Venice, Tomás Saraceno established his studio in Frankfurt am Main in 2005. The studio relocated to Berlin in 2012 and, after a brief interim, moved into the former administrative building of Actien-Gesellschaft für Anilin-Fabrication (AGFA) in Berlin-Rummelsburg. The studio gradually activated and renovated the previously unoccupied building, which was constructed in 1916, and the neighbouring multi-story factory. Studio members from multidisciplinary backgrounds, including designers, architects, anthropologists, biologists, engineers, art historians, curators, and musicians work in the hybrid environment of workshop, office, workshop, the Arachnophilia Research Laboratory and Aerocene community-enthusiasts.
On Air Exhibition
2018
ON AIR is an emerging ecosystem that hosts a choreography of multiple voices belonging to human and non-human universes and in which works reveal common, fragile and ephemeral rhythms and trajectories linking these worlds. ON AIR is comprised of the myriad presences, animate and inanimate, that meet and cohabit within it.
The exhibition functions as an ensemble, revealing the strength of the various entities floating in the air and the ways in which they interact with us: from CO2 to cosmic dust, from radio waves to reimagined corridors of movement. Thus, when breath becomes air, the invisible histories that compose the nature of which we are part invite us to poetically reimagine our ways of inhabiting the world – and of being human.
As industrial extraction mines the Earth for resources, threatening entire ecologies, ON AIR celebrates new ways of thinking and new modes of knowledge production that point the way to a planet free of borders and fossil fuels. In so doing, the exhibition responds to the debate and global challenges posed by the Anthropocene, a word coined to define an epoch in which human activity leaves an impact so great that it profoundly modifies terrestrial ecosystems.
Stillness in Motion — Cloud Cities
Exhibition
2017
Stillness in Motion — Cloud Cities, imagines alternative possible scenarios for futures, conjuring an era in which humanity ceases to negatively impact our planet’s fossil-fuel resources. Part of Saraceno’s larger body of work titled Aerocene, it shows us how it is possible to become airborne in collective sustainable environments. The Aerocene multiple artistic experiments re-calibrate our sensory systems, catalyzing the emergence of new ways of inhabiting the world.
Stillness in motion refers to how it feels to float in the air, condensing the gap between our perception and experience of the ocean of air at the bottom of which we dwell. When it comes to buoyancy – the tendency or capacity to remain afloat in a liquid or rise in air or gas – or more precisely to experience buoyancy the sensible dimension seems to override the scientific thermodynamical and physical explanations or implications. This buoyancy can be defined as intense weightlessness: becoming lighter than air to challenge gravity. Becoming airborne, being able to travel without sensing it or at least to sense it outside of our ways of perceiving space-time relations, is paradoxically remaining still and being in motion at the same time.
Galaxies Forming along Filaments, like Droplets along the Strands of a Spider’s Web Exhibition
2019
Unlike networks, spheres are not anemic, not just points and links, but complex ecosystems in which forms of life define their “immunity” by devising protective walls and inventing elaborate systems of air conditioning. Inside those artificial spheres of existence, through a process Sloterdijk calls “anthropotechnics,” humans are born and raised. The two concepts of networks and spheres are clearly in contradistinction to one another: while networks are good at describing long-distance and unexpected connections starting from local points, spheres are useful for describing local, fragile, and complex “atmospheric conditions”—another of Sloterdijk’s terms. Networks are good at stressing edges and movements; spheres at highlighting envelopes and wombs.
On the Disappearance of Cloud
2019
In the blurred figure of space, nudging and bending as the waters rise, we come to understand that we rely on a reciprocal alliance between the elements and effects, the shifting winds, the exchange of heat and momentum and the rippling pull of the lunar cycle. Clouds floating at the bottom of an ocean of air become the notations of a score that calls for this needed awareness. Aero(s)cene proposes how to float differently, re-examining freedom of movement whilst preserving earthly cloudscapes, resonating across planetary boundaries.
On the Disappearance of Clouds alongside the sound installation Acqua Alta en clave de Sol form part of the installation Aero scene: When breath becomes air, when atmospheres become the movement for a post fossil fuel era against carbon-capitalist clouds, presented by Tomás Saraceno at the 58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia.
Encounters Project Outcome
