Pol Bury (Belgian, 1922-2005)
screen print of a train
Hand signed and numbered 27/ 62 in pencil
Dimensions: 17.5 X 24.25 inches. (sheet size)
Provenance: Published by Lefebre Gallery, New York.
lithographie en couleurs.
Signées et numérotées 27/62.
This is just for the print. the title sheet is just included for reference.
Pol Bury (1922 – 2005) was a Belgian sculptor who began his artistic career as a painter in the Jeune Peintre Belge (along with Willy Anthoons, James Ensor, Odette Collon, Pierre Alechinsky, Jo Delahaut and Jean Rets) and COBRA groups. (Karel Appel, Constant, Corneille, Christian Dotremont, Asger Jorn etc) Among his most famous works is the fountain-sculpture L'Octagon, located in San Francisco. He was best known for his kinetic, Op Art sculptures. He began his career as a Surrealist painter influenced by the work of Rene Magritte and Yves Tanguy. Paintings he produced in the late 1930s and first half of the ’40s were included in the 1945 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme held in Brussels. Pol Bury was born in La Louvière, Belgium,in 1922. After attending the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Mons in 1938–39, he joined a group of Surrealist poets that included Achille Chavée.
The focus of Bury’s art shifted in 1952 after he visited an exhibition featuring Alexander Calder’s work. The movement of Calder’s mobiles captivated Bury, and he began producing sculptures with moving components. These early kinetic sculptures were exhibited in the 1955 group exhibition Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise René in Paris. The exhibition proved particularly influential for the international ZERO network (active in the late 1950s and early ’60s), and Bury went on to participate in ZERO exhibitions and contribute to Heinz Mack and Otto Piene’s ZERO journal. Bury began to include electric motors in many of his sculptures in 1957. The concealed motors activate the works, prompting elements to twist, tilt, or spin. Around 1964, the artist started creating his Cinetizations: photographs and prints depicting well-known monuments, but with the architectural structure fundamentally altered. In a Cinetization featuring the Eiffel Tower, the iron structure appears to wobble as if on the brink of collapse. Bury’s sculptures and Cinetizations both demonstrate moments of physical contingency that belie gravity’s certain pull. In the late 1960s, Bury began working with stainless steel and Cor-Ten steel, polished brass, and copper. By 1969 he had created his first public fountain, at the University of Iowa Museum of Art.
He was included in the influential 1975 MoMA show Prints by Sculptors along with Alexander Archipenko, Jean (Hans) Arp, Lee Bontecou, Louise Bourgeois, Alexander Calder, Christo, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Louise Nevelson, Eduardo Paolozzi, Niki de Saint Phalle and Richard Serra. His early kinetic art sculptures were exhibited in the 1955 group exhibition Le Mouvement at Galerie Denise Rene in Paris. Artists, who experimented with motion, such as Alexander Calder, Marcel Duchamp, Yaacov Agam, Pol Bury, Jesus Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely, and Victor Vasarely. With Lefebre Gallery X Cinetizations Portfolio, 1966. He also published large silkscreen works on canvas with Brooke Alexander gallery. His work is present in the permanent collection of numerous museums worldwide.Retrospectives featuring the artist’s work have been organized by the University Art Museum, University of California, Berkeley, in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1970); Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City (1977–78); Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1982); and Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop, Germany (1990). Bury died on September 27, 2005, in Paris.
