Pol Bury
(b.1922, Belgium – 2005, France)
Pol Bury was a Belgian sculptor who began his artistic career as a Surrealistic painter in Jeune Peintre Belge and Cobra groups. However he soon abandoned this to devote himself to the art of motion, becoming one of the leading kinetic artists of the twentieth century.
After studying briefly at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Mons 1938-9, he frequented the circle of Surrealist poets at La Louvière and was influenced by the paintings of Magritte and Tanguy. His first principal one-man exhibition was at the Galerie Apollo, Brussels, 1953. Gave up painting in 1953 and experimented with various types of kinetic works, introducing motors in 1957 and making the parts move with an almost imperceptible but jerky slowness, and in a random way. Pol Bury was one of the leaders of the Kinetic art movement and undoubtably one of the foremost artists on its genre. He was well- known for his large-scale sculptures and installations combining optical illusion and motion predominately associated with the surroundings. The peculiarity of Bury’skinetic wearable art is far more sensual than its mathematical mechanism, producing a melodic sound and a changing sparkle of metal throughout its continuous motion.
In 1985 Bury received Paris’s Grand Prix National de Sculpture. He has had retrospective in exhibition in Guggenheim Museum, New York (1971).
