Born Panagiotis Vassilakis in Athens, Takis (1925–2019) spent more than seventy years expanding the purview of art and taking it into domains previously belonging to experimental physicists. A leading figure in the kinetic art movement of the 1960s, he made sculptures, paintings, performances and sound works incorporating invisible forces as a fourth dimension − especially magnetics, his lifelong subject of study.

Among his many works involving electromechanical devices, often salvaged from army surplus stores, are the ‘Signals’ series, antenna-like sculptures topped with metal shapes or flashing lights that sway in response to the slightest vibrations. Takis also created reliefs, paintings and self-performing sculptures that use magnets to animate metallic objects suspended near their surfaces. While another series, titled ‘Musicals’, are automated instruments employing electromagnets and electric guitar pickups to create reverberant sounds the artist called ‘raw music’.

Takis was an autodidact and self-professed ‘instinctive scholar’, but his accomplishments led to an invitation to serve as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968. He drew on technological discoveries, ancient philosophy and Zen Buddhism to develop unique and oftentimes mystical forms embodying time, space and energy.