Pol Bury

The work

Volume figé M NC (immobilized volume M NC)
1993
24 x 35 x 25 cm
Original multiple work no. 2/8
Copper sculpture with patina

The Volumes Figés (immobilized volumes) and the Volumes Miroir (mirror volumes) were two small-format series that Pol Bury continued to produce throughout the last decades of his life.

As immobilized volumes, we must consider that a certain movement has taken place beforehand. What we have before us are the successive positions of the same square plate which, when rotated on one of its edges, traces a regular helical curve—generated by a straight line—and an irregular one, since each square is smaller than the one below it. The helix is a common shape in nature, such as the shell of a snail.

While the theoretical movement of a geometric form of revolution is ideal, and therefore eternal, in nature it is not. Death stops the movement and, perhaps, the passage of time in which the chemical components will eternalize it in the form of a fossil.

The reference to death and fossils is taken from a text written by Bury, La lenteur arrêtée, La lentitud detenida, in a booklet published as a presentation of the Volumes figés exhibition in 1996.

The complete collection of Volumes Figés consists of 28 different pieces. Eight numbered copies were produced of this particular work; this is 2/8. The 28 are different and are ordered by letters of the alphabet, in this case N. C indicates the material, copper. There is another almost identical series made of polished stainless steel called Volumes Miroir, mirror volumes.

The artist

(1922, Haine-Saint-Pierre, La Lovière, Bèlgica– 2005, París)

Pol Bury was one of the leading kinetic artists.
A summary of his artistic life must begin with a brief stint at the School of Fine Arts in Mons at the age of 18 and his trip to Brussels in 1940, where he came into contact with the Surrealist group and René Magritte. The German invasion of Belgium and the war put an end to any plans. Bury joined the resistance and fled to France.
In 1945, the war ended and Magritte organized Surrealism, an international exhibition featuring 36 artists, including Bury. In 1948, in Paris, he turned to abstract painting with the expressionist group CoBrA (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam).

In 1950, a momentous event took place: Calder’s exhibition at the Maeght Gallery in Paris, where he discovered the “language of movement.” He understood that rest does not exist in the universe and decided that energy, space, and time should be the focus of his aesthetic research.
In 1953, he definitively adopted volume in an exhibition in Brussels, 10 Mobile Planes, 10 works formed by overlapping irregular geometric panels in flat colors that could be positioned independently as they rotated around a central axis. Viewers could move them to form their own abstract compositions. This game of chance did not satisfy Bury, and he eliminated external intervention by introducing small hidden electric motors that moved them slowly.

Gallery owner Denise René invited him to the historic exhibition Le Mouvement, which she presented in Paris in 1955. This was a decisive moment for Bury. The presence of works by Duchamp and Calder lent legitimacy to the new generation of artists participating in what was the public presentation of Kinetic Art.
By 1958, the foundations of Pol Bury’s art were already in place: volume, abstraction, geometry, movement, and slowness.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he produced a series of works, among which the following stand out:
The Puntuations, bundles of very fine, long rods of the same dark color as the support base from which they emerge. They move slowly vertically or horizontally. The ends of all of them are painted with a small white spot that looks like a constellation of imperceptibly moving floating dots with a hypnotic effect on the viewer.
Furnitures, parallelepiped shapes made of wood on which cubes, spheres, cylinders, and/or pyramids move slowly and unpredictably.
All the works bear the mark of the surrealism of his youth. The unexpected and the enigmatic always accompany a disconcerting sense of humor with a Dadaist bent.

His participation in the 1964 Venice Biennale propelled him to the United States, where he established himself on the international scene. In 1970, he was a visiting professor at Berkeley, where he began a retrospective tour that ended at the Guggenheim in New York. Aimé Maeght exhibited his work in Paris and in his galleries in Zurich and Barcelona.
This situation allowed him to take on large-scale projects and work with metal. Steel, copper, and brass made it possible to adopt magnetism as a driving force. During the same years, polished, curved, or spherical steel surfaces, slowly animated, became mirrors that reflect and move the viewer’s surroundings.

In 1973, he began the series String Sculptures. Piano strings stretched across a wooden structure are plucked by metal nails attached to sectioned cylinders and moving spheres. The random composition is reminiscent of musical forms close to those of John Cage.
In 1969, he had incorporated water as a driving force. Water is a mirror in constant motion—a theme that already interested the Impressionists—and a means of moving geometric volumes, especially spheres. The Kinetic Fountain for the University of Iowa Museum was the first attempt 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 New York in 1980, in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris in 1985, in Seoul in 1988, and in Yamagata, Japan, in 1994.

From the 1980s until the end of his life, fountains and sky catchers, geometric stainless steel pieces installed outdoors that reflect the sky, occupied a large part of his production. At the same time, he never stopped making small-format works such as the Volumes Figés and Volumes Miroir series, to which the present work belongs.