Top 12 Quotes by Naum Gabo

The image my work invokes is the image of good - not evil; the image of order - not chaos; the image of life - not death. And that is all the content of my constructions amounts to.

The image my work invokes is the image of good - not evil; the image of order - not chaos; the image of life - not death. And that is all the content of my constructions amounts to.

Naum Gabo

Order, Evil, Chaos

Naum Gabo (1957). “Gabo : constructions, sculpture, paintings, drawings, engravings : with introductory essays”

The shapes we are creating are not abstract, they are absolute. They are released from any already existant thing in nature and their content lies in themselves.

Naum Gabo

Nature, Lying, Creating

Naum Gabo (2000). “Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews”

The Force of Art lies in its immediate influence on human psychology and in its active contagiousness.

Naum Gabo

Art, Lying, Psychology

Naum Gabo (2000). “Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews”

If an artist has no experience before he makes a painting or a sculpture, he is not an artist.

Naum Gabo

Artist, Inexperience, Sculpture

Naum Gabo (2000). “Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews”

What we cannot express by the art of thinking, by the art of science or philosophy or logic, we can and should express by the poetic, visual, or some other arts.

Naum Gabo

Art, Philosophy, Thinking

We know only what we do, what we make, what we construct; and all that we make, all that we construct, are realities. I call them images, not in Plato's sense (namely that they are only reflections of reality), but I hold that these images are the reality itself and that there is no reality beyond this reality except when in our creative process we change the images: then we have created new realities.

Naum Gabo

Plato, Reflection, Reality

Eidos: A Journal of Painting, Sculpture, and Design, No. 1, p. 31, 1950.

The way of a creative mind is always positive, it always asserts; it does not know the doubts which are so characteristic of the scientific mind.

Naum Gabo

Optimism, Creative, Doubt

Naum Gabo (2000). “Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews”

Art is not concerned with the meditation about what is and how it came to be. That is a task for knowledge. Knowledge is born of the desire to know, Art derives from the necessity to communicate and to announce.

Naum Gabo

Art, Communication, Meditation

Naum Gabo (2000). “Gabo on Gabo: Texts and Interviews”

I consider morals and aesthetics one and the same, for they cover only one impulse, one drive inherent in our consciousness - to bring our life and all our actions into a satisfactory relationship with the events of the world as our consciousness wants it to be, in harmony with our life and according to the laws of consciousness itself.

Naum Gabo

Law, Events, World

"The Quotable Artist". Book by Peggy Hadden, 2010.