Born in 1922 in Haine Saint-Pierre in Belgium, Pol Bury studied at the Academy of Beaux-Arts in Mons from 1938, and between 1940 and 1953, he started his career as a painter. Interested for a short time in the surrealist movement, he notably participated as an illustrator in the surrealist review «L’invention collective» created by Magritte and Ubac in 1940. In 1945, he becomes one of the founders of the «Haute nuit» group with Achille Chavée, which specialised in publishing, and took part in the COBRA’ movement in 1949. He created the Montbéliard academy with André Balthasar in 1954. 

 

Having discovered Calder’s works, he abandoned painting for the sculpture and exhibited for the first time his «Plans Mobiles». Influenced by cinetism, he created panels the appearence of which depends on the position of the visitor. In 1957 his first animated works appeared, called «Multi-plans». He then used various elements such as lighting effects, balls or still disks. Bury began his important series of  opened and closed sculptures in 1963.

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At the beginning of the 1960s, he started working with flat surfaces again and created his famous «Cinétisations», photographs which he had taken or bought and then cut up. He was mainly interested in New York, Chicago and Paris. Moreover he said in the Pol Bury catalogue by André Balthazar published by Cosmos in 1976 « the verticality of New York skyscrapers lend themselves perfectly to the process of cinétisation.».

In 1968, he returned to sculptures and works based on the notion of attraction and repulsion, therefore metal became the material he used the most frequently. Bury also created jewelry as well as monumental works, mainly fountains, for various institutions and places such as the Guggenheim Museum in New York or even the Palais-Royal gardens in Paris 

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In addition to his artist’s status, Bury also wrote texts in which he evoked his work and his artistic motivations. He participated on numerous occasions in collective exhibitions as well as in various personal exhibitions in galleries.