Tour Montparnasse, 1990

Born in Belgium, Pol Bury began his artistic evolution as a Surrealist painter, but eventually became widely known for his kinetic sculptures. His most famous work is usually cited as L’Octagon, a fountain-sculpture situated in San Francisco, for which he employed water as a means of emphasizing this work. Pol Bury was initially involved in the Surrealist movement, drawn in by the artistic endeavours of Yves Tanguy and Rene Margritte. However, he soon branched out into other forms of art and was notably struck by the work of Alexander Calder - this is what sparked the turn to sculpting. Bury’s work as a sculptor was heavily based on cinétisation, or kinetic art. He initially adopted the use of panels, cutting them into different shapes and using lighting disks or balls in order to create differences in how his work would look, dependent on the angle from which a viewer was looking - a technique used in his first exhibition, Plans Mobiles. For a time, Bury also used photographs as a way of manipulating his final output - he would cut up pictures of New York skyscrapers and then reassemble them to create an image of a buckling skyline. He eventually returned to sculpting and chose metal as his primary material, with his works focusing on the idea of attraction and repulsion. Movement was key in Pol Bury's work, but a lot of this movement was so minute and so slow that it was hardly even visible. Bury noted, however, that "speed limits space; slowness creates it". (Artist website)