Naum Gabo Quotes

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 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.

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

Being a creation of Man, art re-creates Man.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

We affirm depth as the only pictorial and plastic form of space.

Art has no need of philosophical arguments, it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems; Art like life, dictates systems to philosophy.