Takis (Panagiotis Vassilakis)

Panagiotis Vassilakis was born in Athens on 29 October 1925 and grew up through the Occupation and the Civil War. He had no formal art training; as a young man he drew and made plaster figures, looking at ancient Greek and Cycladic sculpture, and at Giacometti and Picasso in reproductions. Like many Greek artists of his generation he left the country, and in 1954 he settled in Paris, signing his work simply «Takis».

There he found his subject quickly. Struck by the forest of signals, lights and antennas in railway stations, he made his first Signaux (Signals) in the mid-1950s, and around 1959 he began using electromagnets. In 1960, in an event at the Iris Clert gallery in Paris, the South African poet Sinclair Beiles was briefly suspended in the air by a magnet, reciting a manifesto: a man in space before the first astronaut. Takis worked in London and in the United States, and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at MIT in 1968. In January 1969 he walked into the Museum of Modern Art in New York and removed one of his own works from an exhibition, in protest at its being shown without his consent; the act helped launch the Art Workers' Coalition, which fought for artists' rights.

From 1986 he set up a foundation and research centre in Gerakas, east of Athens, where he lived and worked in his last decades. In 2019 Tate Modern in London opened a large retrospective of his work. He died in Athens on 9 August 2019, aged 93.

Takis wanted to make energy visible. His Signals are thin, flexible steel rods, sometimes several metres high, topped with lamps, little objects or scraps of metal; they sway in the wind and blink like the signal lights of an airfield, a landscape of technology turned into poetry. His magnetic sculptures, or télésculptures, use hidden electromagnets to hold nails, needles, metal cones and balls in suspension, trembling in the air without touching anything, so that the force itself becomes the work.

From the mid-1960s he turned magnetism into sound with his Musicales: a needle or a metal ball, pulled back and forth by a magnet, strikes a single amplified string, producing a slow, deep, almost cosmic music. He collaborated with musicians and scientists, and he liked to say that art and science were looking for the same thing.

His best-known public work is the Bassin Takis at La Défense, the business district of Paris, completed around 1990: a long pool in which dozens of tall light-signals rise from the water, glowing at night among the office towers. Other Signals stand in squares and gardens in Paris, Athens and elsewhere. His work belongs to the kinetic art of the 1950s and 1960s, beside Jean Tinguely and Yaacov Agam, but with something unmistakably Greek: a love of light, of the sky and of a simple, almost archaic form.

In Athens you can visit the Takis Foundation (Ίδρυμα Τάκις) in Gerakas, the house and studio complex where he lived and worked, where Signals and magnetic works stand in the garden and the studio; it opens at set times, so check before you go. In Paris, take the metro to La Défense at dusk and walk along the pool of light-signals. His works are in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Tate and MoMA and in the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens. Greek newspapers and television paid tribute to him in 2019, when the Tate retrospective introduced him to a new generation.

• He never went to art school; he taught himself in Athens before moving to Paris in 1954.
• In 1960 he made a poet float in mid-air in a Paris gallery, held by a magnet.
• In 1969 he took his own sculpture out of an exhibition at MoMA in New York, in protest.
• «Takis» is simply the usual Greek nickname for Panagiotis, and it became his only signature.