Collection: Pol Bury

Pol Bury (1922–2005, Belgium) began as a painter associated with the CoBrA group before turning to kinetic sculpture and, from the early 1960s, to a body of photo-based works he called Cinetisations. These works cut and reassembled photographic images of fixed monuments — the Statue of Liberty, the Pan Am Building, the Eiffel Tower — so that they appear to buckle, swerve, or collapse into themselves. The process translates the logic of his kinetic sculptures into the printed image: movement is not recorded but constructed, imposed on the static surface through incision and reassembly.

MoMA holds works from the X Cinetizations series (1966), and the Met has described the Cinetisations as producing images that “swerve, buckle, or collapse into themselves.” Bury’s work sits at the intersection of kinetic art, Conceptualism, and the photographic manipulation that would become central to image culture in subsequent decades.

Items in this section include periodicals, exhibition catalogues, and printed matter in which Bury’s work appears as cover image, subject, or reproduced work.