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Naum Gabo KBE, born Naum Neemia Pevsner (5 August [24 July] 1890 – 23 August 1977) was a famous Russian sculptor in the Constructivism movement and a pioneer of Kinetic Art. Gabo grew up in a Jewish family of six children in the provincial Russian town of Bryansk, where his father owned a factory.

 His older brother was fellow Constructivist artist Antoine Pevsner; Gabo modified his name to avoid misunderstanding with him. Gabo was a fluent speaker and writer of German, French, and English in addition to his native Russian. His command of many languages contributed greatly to his mobility during his career. “As in thought, so in feeling, a vague communication is not any communication at all," Gabo once remarked.

The essence of Gabo's art was the exploration of space which he believed may be done without having to depict mass. His earliest constructions such as Head No.2 were formal experiments in depicting the volume of a figure without carrying its mass. Gabo's other concern as described in the Realist Manifesto was that art required to exist actively in four dimensions including time.

Gabo's childhood years were in Munich, where he was impressed by and actively participated in the artistic, scientific, and philosophical debates of the early years of the 20th century. Because of his involvement in these intellectual debates, Gabo became a number one figure in Moscow’s avant garde, in post-Revolution Russia.
It was in Munich that Gabo attended the lectures of art historian Heinrich Wolff in and gained information of the ideas of Einstein and his fellow innovators of scientific theory, also the philosopher Henri Bergson.

As a student of medicine, natural science and engineering, his understanding of the order present in the natural world mystically links all creation in the universe. Just before the onset of the First World War in 1914, Gabo discovered fashionable art, by reading Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, which asserted the principles of abstract art.