Pol Bury (1922- 2005) is a Belgian kinetic artist, painter and film-maker, born in Haine-Saint-Pierre. After studying briefly at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Mons 1938-9, he frequented the circle of Surrealist poets and was influenced by the paintings of Magritte and Tanguy. Bury painted geometrical abstract pictures between 1949-53; he was closley associated with the COBRA group from 1949 until the formal disbanding of the group in 1951. In 1953 Bury started to make 'plans mobiles' of painted shapes which could be pivoted manually on their axis. The artist's first one-man exhibition opened at the Galerie Apollo, Brussels, in 1953.
Bury gave up painting in 1953 and experimented with various types of kinetic works, introducing motors in 1957 which made the composition move with an almost imperceptible but jerky slowness, in an entirely random way. Bury moved to France in 1961 (first Fontenay-aux-Roses, then Saulx-les-Chartreux), and from 1964 until his death in 2005 frequently visited the USA. His later works also include kinetizations of photographs and engravings, a few large-scale sculptures such as '25 Tons of Columns' and several films.