This hardback exhibition book is the first English-language introduction to Takis, a key figure of Europe’s post-war avant-garde and cultural underground. With new essays and a selection of primary sources, this catalogue foregrounds the artist’s influence in contemporary art since the 1960s.

Creating a variety of sculpture, painting and musical structures, Takis made works that harness invisible natural forces. Perhaps best known are his innovative ‘telemagnetic’ works, which were begun in the late 1950s using everyday metallic objects that float in space through the use of magnets. His fierce individualism won him the admiration of Beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and led to polemics with his artistic contemporaries Yves Klein, Giacometti and Jean Tinguely.

Guy Brett is one of the UK’s foremost art writers and curators of kinetic art.

Michael Wellen is Curator, International Art, Tate Modern, London.

Melissa Warak is a leading expert on Takis in the United States, based at the University of Texas at El Paso.