Takis (Panayiotis Vassilakis)

Takis revered Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti

Takis was born Panayiotis Vassilakis on 29 October 1925 in Athens. The shockwaves of the First World War coined and overshadowed his childhood as did the build-up and outbreak of the Second World War. The family’s wealth had already been largely depleted during the ‘Asia Minor Catastrophe’ which followed the Greek-Turkey war of 1919-1922, and after the occupation of German and Italian troops and civil war, very little of it was left. It was precisely during these dark days that Panayiotis Vassilakis took an interest in the light of art, which he felt shone particularly brightly in the works of Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti. When he set up his own studio in the basement at around the age of 20, he did so against the wishes of his family, who did not understand his inclinations., and in 1952, he went on to found his first studio in the Anakassa district of Athens with his childhood friends and fellow artists Minos Argyrakis and Raimondos. 

Panayiotis Vassilakis was fascinated by kinetic art

Panayiotis Vassilakis was a self-taught artist his whole life. He never attended an official art school, acquired his design skills through trial and observation, and from the 1950s, undertook several study trips to Paris and London, working for several months in the studio of the Romanian-French sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. He produced mostly figurative sculptures at the beginning in the style of archaic art, but from 1955 became increasingly fascinated by kinetic art, as an important representative of which he achieved international popularity. On a visit to the Calais train station, he was so impressed by the technical apparatus and radar antenna set up there that he created his first Signal which he presented as a public art action with light and fireworks in Paris. Panayiotis Vassilakis, who as an artist called himself Takis – a common abbreviation of his fist name – exhibited with the Greek-French art collector and gallerist Iris Clert in Paris in 1959, and a year later with the American ballet dancer and art dealer Alexander Iolas, also from Greece, in New York. 

Experiments with the invisible powers of nature

From 1955 to 1965, Takis experimented in particular with the invisible powers of nature which are omnipresent, but which cannot be identified by the human eye. He wished to visualise these powers with his art. He created sculptures and pictures out of electricity, sound and light, and in the 1960s various works based on magnetism arose, projects such as Light Signals and Musical Sculptures, and in the 1970s, the Musical Spaces. The artist visited the key art metropoles of the world to give and received stimuli; he met Marcel Duchamps and the two became artist friends, as he did with the South African poet Sinclair Beiles. Following his participation in the fourth Documenta in Kassel in 1968, he was invited to Documenta 6 in 1977.

Takis died on 9 August 2019 in his hometown of Athens.