LONDON, ENGLAND.- The National Art Collections Fund (The Art Fund) has given the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art $43,073 – one third of the total purchase price – to help with the acquisition of Naum Gabo’s celebrated sculpture Construction through a Plane (c 1937). The work has been on loan to the gallery since February 2000, and this successful purchase will ensure that the work remains in the public domain. Other funding towards the acquisition came from the Henry Moore Foundation and the Alan Roger bequest.



Naum Gabo (1890–1977) moved around Europe, settling first in Berlin, then Paris, before coming to London in 1936, where he quickly became the leading figure in the British abstract movement. Construction through a Plane was made in London during the ten years Gabo lived in Britain (1936-46), and is one of the first works in which he used Perspex, a new form of plastic he had discovered in the year of the work’s creation.



The organisation of geometric and curving planes within this work creates a sense of energy and movement, and conveys a powerful impression of a vortex opening up before the eyes of the viewer. Naum Gabo remarked that ‘There is no other content to look for than the pure plastic composition. The rhythm of the lines, the spatial order of the shapes and imaginary columns, the tension of the latent motion hidden in their visual equilibrium, are the main substance of these plastics.’