Takis — COSMO — TAKIS — Xippas Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In 13 days: October 20 → December 31, 2025

*Opening Monday October 20th, 2025
Curated by Alfred Pacquement
*
One hundred years ago, on October 29, 1925, Panayiotis Vassilakis, known as Takis, was born in Athens.

The Xippas gallery has chosen to celebrate a dual anniversary — the centenary of Takis’s birth and the gallery’s 35th year — by presenting a selection of the artist’s historical works, curated by Alfred Pacquement.

A major figure in sculpture since the late 1950s, Takis has set magnetic forces in motion, defying gravity in a universe of light and sound. Fascinated by technology, which he imbues with a poetic dimension, by radars that detect metallic objects in the cosmos, by invisible waves that pass through the atmosphere transmitting messages, Takis chose magnetism as the basis of his visual language. Thus, a simple nail or any other metallic element is levitated by a magnet. In 1960, he pushed this approach to its paroxysm by exhibiting The Impossible, a Man in Space at the Iris Clert Gallery, a portrait of which appears in the exhibition. Suspended in the void and held by magnets, the poet Sinclair Beiles proclaimed «I am a sculpture.»

The introduction of light and electromagnets, which add continuous vibrations or sudden, random movements to the devices, broadens the artistic vocabulary. This vocabulary would later include sound, introduced through musical sculptures in which an electromagnet attracts and repels a needle, causing a piano string to vibrate. As early as 1961, Takis dreamed of creating an instrument capable of capturing the music of the beyond, as he wrote in “ Estafilades”. He further expanded his approach through theatrical performances and monumental installations—such as Trois Totems — Espace musical at the Centre Pompidou (1981)—and by engaging with urban environments, notably with the Light Signals fountain at La Défense (1987).

Renos Xippas began working with Takis in 1974. Initially studio director, he quickly became Takis’s confidant and later his gallerist, starting in October 1990 with the opening of his gallery in Paris. Their relationship was marked by an uninterrupted artistic collaboration that spanned 45 years, resulting in over thirty exhibitions in galleries and international institutions. Renos Xippas inaugurated his Paris gallery 35 years ago with what remains, to this day, Takis’s most significant gallery exhibition: a large-scale installation paying homage to Marcel Duchamp, a musical environment, and a forest of light signals that filled every space of the gallery.

This new exhibition takes the form of a retrospective anthology, retracing the key moments of the artist’s career. It opens with rare wrought-iron sculptures from 1954, which bear witness to the beginnings of his work, shaped by the dual influence of Giacometti’s hieratic figures and the Greek archaic tradition—an influence echoed in their mythologically inspired titles. Within this selection of historical works retracing the main facets of Takis’s sculpture, one will also find a rare Télésculpture — Jeu d’échecs from 1964, a tribute to Duchamp, as well as a large collection of metal signals, including some of the very first created by the artist. Fascinated by the «iron jungle» he discovered at Calais railway station, Takis began designing his first abstract sculptures by assembling flexible rods with gentle vibrating oscillations, topped with salvaged elements and later enhanced with flashing lights.

An «intuitive scholar» as he described himself, Takis succeeded in merging artistic exploration with scientific innovation in a highly original way. Telepaintings and magnetic walls that question the very notion of painting, spherical interior spaces—sometimes exploded—dials with random flashes, pendulums and magnetic balls in constant oscillation, and sound sculptures generating unpredictable music: all of these elements come together in the exhibition, offering a synthesis of a unique visual universe and one of the most essential artistic approaches of recent decades.