PARIS.- True to its mission to present art from France across all generations, the
Palais de Tokyo continues its exploration into the interstices between art and the sciences by paying tribute to the great sculptor and inventor Takis who will turn 90 in 2015.
The first person to “send a man into space,” six months before Yuri Gagarin, during a famous performance, and who realized a monumental basin of light signals on the esplanade of La Défense in 1988 that thousands of people see every day, probably without knowing anything of their author, is a major figure in post-war art. Born in Athens and based in Paris since the 1950s, Takis set about exploring magnetic field energy in his work. Working in proximity with his contemporaries of the New Realism movement, he integrated light and music in combination with the use of magnets into his sculptural practice.
From his exposition of magnetic forces to his “tribute to Kafka” and his erotically charged bronze sculptures, the exhibition brings together around fifty spectacular pieces. This is one of the most comprehensive solo exhibitions of Takis’ work since the Jeu de Paume’s show of 1993.
A tireless experimenter and “intuitive scientist”, Takis has continuously sought to capture cosmic energy by combining art and science.
As a contemporary plastician, his work is grounded in a sculptural tradition that spans archaic Greek sculpture and Giacometti on the one hand and the rejects of technology on the other.
Fascinated by the “scientific magic” at the core of inventions (he even registered a number of industrial patents), Takis is also a science philosopher, regularly drawing inspiration from the great ancestors of preSocratic philosophy, Hippocratic medicine, and Ancient Egypt.
“Consequently Takis, cheerful ploughman of magnetic fields and indicator of the soft iron railway.” Marcel Duchamp had a gift for aphorisms and the one he dedicated to Takis in 1962 shortly after their encounter in New York has the immense virtue of condensing in a few words Takis’ contribution to the history of contemporary sculpture. Indeed magnetic energy the force of magnets, able to hold metallic materials in suspension constitute the main vocabulary of an artist whose plastic inventions are in direct relation with their scientific counterparts.
Yet the railway reference in Duchamp’s quip is anything but gratuitous : it was in fact seeing Calais railway station that led Takis to imagine his first abstract sculptures, forests of metallic signals with their flexible stems and gentle movements, soon to be completed by other long, vertical antennae that culminated in blinking lights. “Monsters’ eyes flashed on and off, train tracks, tunnels, an iron jungle,” wrote Takis in Estafilades, his autobiography published in 1961.
An inventor as much as he is an artist (he has even registered industrial patents), referring to himself as an “intuitive scholar”, contemporary avant-garde visual artist but also a philosopher of science drawing regularly from the great ancestors of pre-Socratic philosophy from Hippocratic medicine all the way back to Ancient Egypt, Takis is a major figure in post-war sculpture. His highly original vocabulary of forms is inseparable from the energy of magnetic fields that underlies his entire oeuvre. Fascinated by the world of modern technology, by radars able to detect metallic objects throughout the cosmos and by invisible waves transmitting messages or sounds, he focused on magnetism when he invented his Télésculptures. A single nail is held in suspension by a magnet.
This defying of gravity reached its climax when he exposed his “man in space” (L’impossible, un homme dans l’espace, 1960), a performance during which poet Sinclair Beiles declared “I am a sculpture” while being held suspended in the air by magnets. The introduction of light and the light of electromagnets which add a continuous vibration or sudden random movements to these installations completes this first phase of plastic experimentation. At the time, Takis was working with top scientists during a residency at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
Continuing his experimentation, he associated light (in his Télélumières in which molten mercury conducted electricity in lamps evoking primitive laboratories) and sound with his musical sculptures. Takis constantly strives to capture cosmic energy. A relentless explorer, he has experimented widely by realizing performances, working in theater and ballet and later by developing projects in the urban space. He also seeks to better integrate art into society with his abundant production of multiples while remaining an eternal agitator, as demonstrated by his role in the Art Workers’ Coalition, an organization defending artists’ rights in the United States. Takis is certainly the artist of his generation who was best able to link art to science, paving the way for all sorts of artistic approaches in the decades to come.
Takis was born on 29 October 1925 in Athens. An autodidactic artist, he relocated to Paris during the 1950s and met contemporaries such as Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely who were also exhibited by the Iris Clert gallery, one of the most active galleries in Paris of the time. During this period he realized his first Signaux: thin metal rods stood on end like antenna. Shortly after, his discovery of magnetic fields became the foundation of his sculptural exploration. After garnering attention with his exhibition L’Impossible, un homme dans l’espace [The Impossible, A Man in Space], a few months before Gagarin’s first space voyage, he published his autobiography, Estafilades in 1961. During the 1960s, Takis lived between Paris, London and New York, where he met Marcel Duchamp. He exhibited regularly in the three cities and continued to develop his practice by incorporating light (Télélumières) and sound (Sculptures musicales). Invited by the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he worked in collaboration with scientists. His first museum exhibitions occur in the 1970s in Paris and Germany. He was working at the time in theater and contributed to numerous performances. His monumental installation 3 Totems – Espace musical at the Centre Pompidou in 1981 was especially acclaimed. In 1993, the biggest retrospective of his sculptural work ever organized took place in Paris at the Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume.
The same year, he inaugurated in Athens a research center for art and science (KETE) where his work is permanently exhibited. Mainly established in Greece, Takis still regularly travels to Paris where he has installed a number of works in the public space in the last few years, such as the pieces that can be seen on the esplanade at La Défense or in front of the UNESCO building. In 2015 on his 90th birthday, he will be exhibiting at the Menil Collection in Houston and at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris.
Guest curator: Alfred Pacquement
