Section:GDN 1J PaGe:8 Edition Date:190831 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 30/8/2019 16:32 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

• The Guardian Sat urday 31 Aug ust 2019

8 Obituaries

I

n February 1955 the Greek

artist Takis stood bored on

the platform at Calais train

station. He was travelling

back to Paris from London,

where he had had his fi rst

solo exhibition, but his train

was delayed. His eyes fell on

a trackside signal, a metal upright

pole with fl ashing lights at the top.

Mesmerised , he began to mentally

catalogue all the other signals,

aerials and signs that scattered the

terminal. When he eventually got

home, and despite the success of

his fi gurative sculpture to date, he

resolved that his art would thereon

include elements of movement

and light.

Takis , who has died aged 93,

was a pioneer of kinetic art , using

electricity, magnetism, sound and

other unseen forces to create work

that ranged from sculpture and

public art to performance. Signals

Takis

Creator of kinetic art

using the forces of

electricity, magnetism,

light and sound

became his best known work, a

series of sculptures developed over

the next fi ve decades that would

include motors, bulbs and fi reworks.

“Before long, my Signals were

transformed from railway signals

into rockets, antennae and radio

receivers. Travelling often by

aeroplane, I was always delighted

by the aerodromes and their giant

radars which turned slowly, seeking

out the metallic objects which glide

in space. It is as though they were

monstrous instruments intercepting

cosmic events,” he wrote in 1961.

Triple Signal ( 1955) feature d

three tensile steel rods reminiscent

of radio aerials. Firework Signal, a

public performance in the streets

of Paris in 1957, involved a giant

sparkler mounted on a 3-metre

pole. In 1987, 39 Signal sculptures,

some more than 9 metres high,

were installed permanently in

the Esplanade de La Défense in

Paris. The following year Takis was

commissioned to make a similar

work for the Seoul Games.

As well as light, magnetism was

an enduring obsession. In 1963, his

friend the American author William

Burroughs wrote in an exhibition

text: “Takis is working with and

expressing in his sculpture thought

forms of metal ... you can hear metal

think in the electromagnetic fi elds .”

The fi rst of his Murs Magnétiques

were made in 1958 : a series of

monochrome paintings in front

of which hung cone-shaped or

cylindrical steel objects from

invisible thread. A magnet hidden

behind the canvas would propel

these mobiles towards the painted

surface. An early version of his

Sculptures Télémagnétiques,

or Télésculptures, featured a

nail suspended in mid-air by a

magnet. In Magnetic Fields (1969),

currently part of an exhibition of

the artist’s work at Tate Modern in

London , a pendulum swung by a

gallery attendant sets off a wave of

movement through a forest of fl oor-

standing metal rods.

An argument in the late 1950s

with Yves Klein over the French

artist’s attempt to patent the use of

magnets led to Takis staging The

Impossible – Man in Space, at Galerie

Iris Clert, in Paris. The performance

involved a powerful magnet that

suspended the South African poet

Sinclair Beiles in mid-air. Beiles was

to read an anti-nuclear manifesto,

but fell to the ground after the

fi rst sentence: “I am a sculpture.”

According to the critic Guy Brett, the

performance “represented a kind

of collision between three worlds:

the world of art, that of science and

contemporary reality”.

Born Panayiotis Vassilakis in

Athens , Takis was the sixth of

seven children of Alexandra (nee

Leontaritsou) and Athanasios

Vassilakis. His father had r un a

successful property empire but the

fortune was lost during the Greco-

Turkish war. In 1942, as the Axis

occupation solidifi ed in Greece, the

17-year-old joined the resistance

movement the National Republican

Greek League , or EDES. After a year

a rival resistance group, the more

radical Greek People’s Liberation

Army (ELAS) enlisted Takis to spy

on EDES. By 1945 he had publicly

switched sides to ELAS, to become

a leader in its youth wing, which, as

Greece fell into civil war, earned him

a six-month prison sentence.

On release, with little in the way

of formal education, Takis made his

fi rst artwork, two busts, inspired

by seeing sculptures by Picasso

and Giacometti at the American

Cultural Center in Athens in 1951.

As he fell into artistic circles,

From top: works

in the current

Takis exhibition

at Tate Modern,

London,

including a

2-metre Gong,

1978, made

from the rusted

wall of a tanker,

and a moving

Electromagnetic

Sphere, 1979;

the Takis

Foundation in

Athens; the artist

with work he

carried out on

the Athens metro

GUY BELL/REX/

SHUTTERSTOCK, AP,

MENIA KOULI

Signals became

his best-known

work, a series of

sculptures that would

include motors, bulbs

and fi reworks

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