Pol Bury was one of the first practitioners of "kinetic art" in the 1960s. His first kinetic pieces from the 1950s, inspired by Alexander Calder's mobiles, were weather-vane like sculptures that were activated by the viewer. In the late 1960s he began working in stainless and Cor-Ten steel, producing monumental balls that spun or rolled, columns that rotated, and planes that tilted, all activated by concealed electrical mechanisms. He has executed a number of large-scale public commissions, including projects for the Palais Royal in Paris and for the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.
From 1962 to 1988, he began a series of photo-based works called "Cinetisations," in which he cut photographs of architecture and works of art into thin strips, which he then reassembled to create compositions that appear to swerve, buckle, or collapse into themselves. In an interview in 1970, Bury explained, "My cinetised skyscraper reveals the slow-motion work of gravity. ...The intervention in the image might seem to be a menacing desire to destroy, but we must see in it the wish to give an air of liberty to that which thinks itself immutable." He made this "cinetisation" of the Richard J. Daley Center, Chicago's tallest building from 1965 to 1969, when he was teaching in Chicago in the late 1960s.
