Artists & Works

STYLE: HOMAGE TO PICASSO, COBRA, CARBORUNDUM COLLECTION, KINETIC ART

Bury attended the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Mons, and shortly after began to frequent Surrealist studios in Belgium during the thirties. In the forties and fifties he was briefly associated with the CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam), but switched gears when he first saw the mobile sculptures of Alexander Calder. He experimented with mobile sculpture from then on, particularly with works that involved slowly moving parts.

Like his early mentors, the Surrealists, Bury was interested in dilating and distorting reality. Both his lithograph from the Homage to Picasso portfolio and his kinetic sculpture demonstrate this. The lithograph depicts heads inspired by Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon, distorted as if in a funhouse mirror, while the 3 Cubes move slowly, almost imperceptibly, surprising the viewer, who at first takes this work for a minimalist sculpture.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Lynn Macritchie, Art in America, 2/01
The careful scrutiny of an apparently motionless object, say, one of Belgian artist Pol Bury's constructions of painted wooden boards pierced by clusters of fine wires, would be disturbed by the gradual realization that the wires were in fact moving--achingly slowly and almost imperceptibly at first, in the case of 110 White Dots Leaving a Hole--Punctuation (1964)--but with a cumulative and ultimately quite unnervingly erotic effect.