dreamspace

source: telegraphcouk

His use of light, colour, form, movement and sound offered what he described as a harmonious spatial experience, as visitors wearing capes moved through a brightly-coloured honeycomb of translucent cells in reds, blues, greens, yellows and greys. “The space pulls you into and around the work,” one reported. “You stand, sit, walk and lay, as you become part of the space. Your sense of time is challenged.”
Air was pumped through Dreamspace’s different coloured rooms while music played in the background, inducing a tranquil, relaxing mood. Agis explained that the idea was to bring art to the people, providing them with “a release from the chaos and fragmentation of the senses in daily urban life”.
But in July 2006 two women were killed when his giant inflatable maze was torn from its moorings by a gust of wind in a freak accident in a park in Co Durham. Another 11 people, including children, were injured. Agis, who had struggled unsuccessfully to hold his creation down, and was lifted off the ground before he let go, was traumatised. Earlier this year he was convicted of breaching the Health and Safety Act and fined £10,000, reduced on appeal to £2,500.
Agis vowed never to make such large works again. In court he said: “I continue to be consumed by the tragedy of this event, the suffering of all those affected and the grief and pain that they must continue to feel.”
The concept of Dreamspace originated in the mid-1960s when, with his professional partner Peter Jones, Agis set out to create art with “an element of human movement”. His first solo work in 1980 was Colourscape, 49 identical units arranged in abstract geometric patterns of juxtaposed colour and light. Dreamspace, with the added dimension of sound, followed in 1996.
The concept eventually went through five incarnations, attracting a quarter of a million people at 25 venues across Europe. In 2006 a tour supported by a £60,000 grant from the Arts Council began in Liverpool, where a gang of youths delayed the opening by slashing holes in the PVC material with knives.
Maurice Agis was born on December 7 1931 in London. Raised in a Barnardo’s children’s home in the East End, Maurice never met his parents but claimed that he never felt unwanted because he was surrounded by caring people. This positive outlook and extraordinary strength of spirit sustained him throughout his life.
Sturdily built, he survived his first job in a lavatory factory by taking up wrestling. He later became Britain’s amateur light-heavyweight wrestling champion and spent his national service in the Far East, entertaining the troops with boxing tournaments. In Asia, he was inspired to start drawing by the intense light and colour which defined his later work.
Back in London, he landed a lowly job in an advertising agency, where his duties allegedly ranged from cleaning paintbrushes to designing corsets. But his skills as a draughtsman and infectious charm convinced his colleagues to chip in to put him through art school.
At St Martin’s School of Art from 1958 until 1962 he studied sculpture under Anthony Caro. In 1961 Agis’s stone and steel sculptures were shown at the Young Contemporaries exhibition, alongside the work of David Hockney and Allen Jones. He became a fixture and bombastic raconteur at the French House in Soho and Chelsea Arts Club.
At St Martin’s he met Peter Jones, who shared with him his fascination with colour and constructivism, as well as a basement studio in Fulham. Their influence on each other was so intense that eventually a single piece of work – “a study of colour in space” – filled the whole studio.
Domestically, he shared dilapidated digs in Waterloo with the actor Mike Pratt – who later starred in the television series Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) – and a young singer-songwriter called Tommy Steele, who tormented them with early renditions of Little White Bull.
Agis and Jones experimented with translucent PVC to create “abstract walk-through spaces”. Determined to make art accessible to ordinary people, they erected a canopy of coloured tubes in the street and invited passers-by inside, but the police promptly intervened. In the era of love-ins, the authorities had yet to catch on.
Their first major show was Spaceplace at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1966. The following year, Agis and Jones moved to Amsterdam to research the De Stijl movement and staged Spaceplace at the Stedlijk Museum, for which they won the Sikkens Prize.
Success abroad led to a series of nationwide tours with Colourscape, giant interactive installations which Agis described as “surreal, magic, like swimming in a sea of changing colours”. The emotional impact of this explosion of colour, light, and sound was powerful. One visitor commented: “If there were a heaven, walking in your artwork would be an approximation.”
Until 1973 Agis taught at various art schools. Just as he took art out of galleries and onto the streets, he brought his students from the confines of college to the chaos of his studio.
He was a founder of Butler’s Wharf, the derelict warehouses in which painters, poets and punk bands squatted in the 1970s. The parties were epic. When the artists were evicted, Agis helped set up Chisenhale Studios, an artists’ co-operative that still survives. He and Jones eventually parted company in 1978.
Despite the acclaim accorded him, Agis was invariably broke. Undeniably charismatic, he was also strangely naïve. In 1983, just before his show at the Lincoln Centre in New York, the promoter disappeared.
Agis had to move into a hostel and sell postcards to visitors to cover his costs. “If he’d gone the bouncy castle way, he’d have been a millionaire,” his wife Carole declared ruefully. They divorced in the late 1960s.
A reformed character, he spent his later years in Alicante with his Spanish companion, Paloma Brotons, an educationist and poet who was integral to the development of his later work.
Maurice Agis is survived by Paloma Brotons, his ex-wife, and his four children. His ashes will be divided into four pots in the colours that were his trademark: red, green, yellow, and blue.