El visitant: ‘Volume figé M N C, 2/8’, by Pol Bury
Title: Volume figé M N C (Volume stopped M N C)
Author: Pol Bury (La Louvière, Belgium, 1922 - Paris, 2005)
Date: 1993
Technique: copper sculpture with patina
Dimensions: 24 x 35 x 25 cm
Multiple original work nº 2/8
Pol Bury's artistic career began in 1945 in the Belgian surrealist group, with works clearly influenced by Magritte or Tanguy. The mark left by surrealism never left his later kinetic work.
He came into contact with the CoBrA group, created in 1949 and in which he discovered a nonconformity and an experimental freedom that seduced him. At the beginning of the 50s, attracted by geometric abstraction, he met Calder's work, which led him to kineticism. From this moment on, the forms in all his images bear no resemblance to reality or to abstraction; they are basically geometric volumes although the imprint of surrealism will be present in a work that combines the will of unconscious anarchy with a new living language tinged with humor.
With the first experiments with moving colored reliefs, the Mobile Plans of 1950, Bury began independent work. They followed, the Punctuations, works that are both painting and sculpture in which he already incorporated electric motors that transmit enigmatic slow and unpredictable movements. In this way, the notion of time acquires a fundamental importance. Immediately, the Furniture, wooden parallelepiped forms on which cubes, spheres, cylinders and/or pyramids move slowly and unpredictably.
Bury attracted the attention of Galerie Denise René and, later, Galerie Maeght. As a kinetic artist he participated in the Venice Biennale of 1964 and at that moment his international career began. From 1966 to 1968 he spent more time in New York than in Europe. He began to explore metal to use magnetism as the driving energy in his works.
Meanwhile, during that decade of the Sixties, Bury began the Kinetizations, a treatment of photographs of buildings or urban landscapes in Paris, New York or other places in the world, with a technical collage staff. The image, cut into strips, is reconstituted and with a slight displacement, gives the viewer a sense of movement.
In 1969, he incorporated water as a driving force. Water is a mirror in constant motion –a subject that already interested the Impressionists– and a medium that moves geometric volumes, especially spheres. The Kinetic Fountain for the University of Iowa Museum was the first trial in an extensive series of Fountains in spaces open to the public: at the Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the lobby of the Guggenheim Museum in Nova York in 1980, in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris in 1985, in Seoul in 1988 and in Yamagata (Japan) in 1994.
During the decade of the 90s he created works of small format, an example of which were the Volumes figés and the Volumes miroir. The work presented at the Maricel Museum in the program El Visitant is an example.
Image 1: Étienne-Jules Marey. Chronophotography of a man's walk and sequence of motor skills in strokes, c. 1886
Image 2: Volume figé M N C 2018, de Pol Bury, 1993
Image 3: Pol Bury. Cinematization of Manhattan seen from the East River, 1966