On Wednesday June 1, 2022, PIASA is organising an auction of modern and contemporary art.
This session includes some of PIASA's long-time favourites artists, such as the Greek sculptor Takis.
Marcel Duchamp called him a "cheerful labourer of magnetic fields". Takis was able to combine, with a remarkable creativity, new sculptural forms with the powers of nature and scientific phenomena. Magnets have been his favourite material, allowing him to reinvent the data of sculpture, defying the gravity that confronts the artist who works with heavy materials.
Autodidact, he began his work with wrought iron schematic representations of human figures inspired by Cycladic art. But it was in Paris, where he arrived in the mid-fifties, that his abstract work appeared. Calder, who associated movement with abstract metal cut-outs, and Giacometti, with his hieratic vertical figures, gave the young artist examples to follow and surpass.
The signals, long metal antennas ready to oscillate at the slightest movement, hold at their ends pieces of scrap metal, salvaged objects or small flashing lights. They will constitute Takis' primary language. By gathering them together and deploying them in so many metallic bouquets, he symbolically restores the urban landscape. But the extension of Takis' sculptural work will find a new direction when he associates a simple nail to a magnet and keeps it in suspension: the first Telesculpture is born in 1959 and, with it, the countless plastic inventions that Takis will multiply from now on, based on this invisible energy.
Takis (Panayotis Vassilakis know as)
Aeolic signal, 1957
Estimate: 50 000 / 70 000 €
In 1960, he created a performance exhibition entitled The Impossible: A Man in Space, with the poet Sinclair Beiles proclaiming his manifesto "I am a sculpture" while suspended in the void, held in place by magnets. Magnetic walls with levitating elements, held in place by the force of magnets alone; suspended spheres like Foucault's pendulums set in motion by electromagnets; antigravity and magnetic feasts where the visitor throws nails at magnetised panels or manipulates iron filings, creating real metal flowers; dials with measuring instruments whose hands are stimulated by the electric current: these different families of works of visual originality have in common the use of magnetic fields as active materials.
In the sixties, Takis exhibited at the Iris Clert gallery together with Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely. He also met Soto and Pol Bury. He was close to Jean Jacques Lebel and the poets of the Beat Generation. Later, he joined the gallery of his compatriot Alexandre Iolas, where many of the great surrealists were exhibited, and also Martial Raysse and Niki de Saint Phalle. Takis was then at the centre of the Parisian avant-garde. He went to New York where he met Marcel Duchamp and was associated with the intellectual community of the time. Invited by the M.I.T., he developed research associating art and science.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Takis' sculpture is the integration of sound as musical spaces. In Estafilades, he already mentioned his dream: "if I could use an instrument as a radar to capture the music from the afterlife". Takis has designed several musical installations such as those at the Centre Pompidou in 1981, "3 Totems - Musical Space", a theatre of musical panels at his exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in 2015, which brought together, in massive rooms, most aspects of his sculpture...
In 1993, the most important retrospective of his sculptures was held in Paris at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume. The same year he inaugurated a research centre for art and science (K.E.T.E.) in Athens, where his works are on permanent exhibition... In recent years Takis has installed numerous works in public spaces, such as those that can be seen on the esplanade of La Défense or at UNESCO...".
- Alfred Pacquement, Catalogue Hellenic Art, PIASA Auction, June 3, 2015
