Takis was one of the most prominent personalities of both international and greek art scenes. A pioneer of kinetic art, he unfurled his talent after the end of World War II, and he asserted himself by offering a different approach to kinetic art. Self-taught artist by conviction, he managed to create an inextricable link between art and science by combining elements of nature and physics in his sculpturing.

 

He is born in Athens in 1925. His childhood and adolescence are marked by successive wars from which Greece suffered, such as the German and Italian occupation and the Civil War. 

His artistic path starts when he’s around 20 years of age in a basement workshop, despite the fact that his family did not accept his inclination towards the arts, when he comes into contact with the works of Picasso and Giacometti. In 1952 he creates his first atelier with his childhood friends and artists, Minos Argyrakis and Raimondos, in the area of Anakassa, Athens. Takis’ early sculptures are busts from plaster and sculptures from wrought iron inspired by ancient Greek culture as well as artists such as Picasso and Giacometti.

 

In late 1953 he departs for Paris. In 1954, arriving in Paris, he joins for a few months the Brancusi atelier. For approximately three years, he travels and lives between Paris and London, where he inspires and creates his first kinetic works. Impressed by the radar antennas and the technological creations that adorn the train station in Calais, France, he creates his first Signals, which while they start off rigid and with bright marks on top of them, they are gradually changing form. Fireworks are placed on top of them, through which he performs various street art happenings on numerous squares of Paris; they gain flexibility, adorned with “objets trouvés” (found objects) swaying with every breath of wind, and when they collide they produce unique sounds giving the sense of chord’s strokes.

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In 1968, he moves to Massachusetts, where he is invited with a researcher’s scholarship from the University of MIT, and more specifically from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies. There, he creates a series of Electromagnetic sculptures. He studies the hydrodynamic energy and gives shape to his conception called Oscillation of the Sea, while he also inspires a series of Hydro-magnetic sculptures. Radical and subversive, during that time he co-founds the Art Workers Coalition, with the aim of defending artists’ rights against exploitation by galleries, curators and museums. A distinctive event is when he barged into the Museum of Modern Art in order to withdraw his work, before the museum’s security reacted. This symbolic action makes the headlines in the New York Times.

In 1974, having returned back to Paris, he begins creating his Erotic sculptures. “The force of attraction is the denominator of communal magnetism and of eroticism. In 1974 he returns to Greece where he establishes the Research Center for the Art and the Sciences in Gerovouno, Attica, whose official inauguration takes place in 1993.