WEBORGERS-

The Belgian Painters (5)

POL BURY

(contemporary)

12 + 12 Triangles Convexes
Fountain sculpture (Paris)

A SURREALISTIC BEGINNING...
Born in 1922 in Haine-St -Pierre, small town between Mons and Charleroi in the southern part of Belgium, the young Bury was early influenced by the surrealism movement having followers in the region. His first paintings, until 1945, were most of them with surrealism inspiration.
Finally seduced by abstraction in Art, he followed a while the COBRA group with Alechinsky (see the section for this painter in WEBORGERS).

MOVEMENT... LIFE AND UNIVERSE: ALL IS MOVEMENT
During the first half of the 1950s, Bury abandoned painting to devote himself to sculpture, under the influence of Calder and his mobiles. Bury made studies of slow motions in objects and quickly came with the idea of powering his sculptures by electrical motors. He used many different materials such as stainless steel, wood, cork, copper...in his works.
Fascinated by the calm induced by slow motions he put movement in practically all his sculptures, being the founder of "Kinetism" (cinétisme) in Modern sculpture.
In the sixties he teached in a few Universities in the USA, attracted by the buoyant artistic life emerging in America. In the seventies he started experimenting with water and fountains, still in search for the slow movements. A lot of these fountains can be found now all over the world. He also experimented with movements created by the influence of magnets on steel balls, like in his huge "Horizontal Monument Dedicated To Twelve Thousand Balls"

From his first solo exhibition (early 60s) to the present days, the reputation of Pol Bury went growing on an international scale, to make him one of the prominent artists of the second half of this Century.
This eclectic creator is also producing essays, literature and poetry!

A POL BURY SWATCH...
As for Alechinsky, Pol Bury was selected by the watchmaker to decorate the face of a Swatch for their Swatch Art series. See the result here

JEAN-MICHEL FOLON

(contemporary)

Liberty! Drawing by JM Folon

DRAWINGS AND PAINTINGS...
Born in 1934, in Brussels, Folon went to La Cambre the famous Art school in Brussels for studying Architecture. He finally chose to devote his creativity to drawings and very quickly to painting as well.
He was also attracted in the end of the sixties by audio-visual experiments. At the same time, his drawings gained popularity and recognition. His pastel palette of colors and simple graphics, his semi-flying men with hats, his expression of the absurd made him easy recognizable in the images world of the end of the sixties.
Serigraphies, watercolors, pastels were amongst his most favorite supports, as well as oil paintings. Jean-Michel Folon was truly immersed in the graphic scene of the 70s and 80s in Europe and his success was supported by a large general public acclaim.
_{<<<< ' ? ' - Silkscreen printing (1974)}

BY ALL MEDIA...
The highly successful Folon had access to a lot of modern media: posters, books, animated cartoons, publicity, magazine covers... all asking for his drawings. He was the author in the 1970s of a very surrealistic and poetic animated closing screen of TV programs for Antenne 2, a French public TV station: flying little men in trench-coats, with hats and carrying document holders, were floating all around the screen at the daily end of TV transmissions.
His posters and prints were sold in all trendy shops and famous magazines like Time (USA), L'Express (France) put his drawings on their covers. Covers of books, records and even stationary all were using his creations ... Check here for a poster he did for Roland Garros, the French Open tennis competition.
His reputation grew quickly in Europe first and in the USA a little later, and he is still promoted by famous art galleries all over the world.

_{Rapid Relief of Anxiety - watercolor >>>>}

AND MORE MEDIA...
Artist in search of multiple ways to express his creativity, JM Folon even appeared as an actor in some French films with full features and commercial distribution, like "L'Amour Nu" -Naked Love- drama produced in 1981.
He is also the successful illustrator of special editions of books by Lewis Carol, Kafka... and he decorated an Art Swatch you can see here
He made murals in a station of the Brussels' underground and he decorated walls with his landscapes in the Waterloo Station of London.
All these artistic activities were in direct contact with the modern way of life. JM Folon took also part in the problems of our time devoting a lot of support to humanitarian causes such as Amnisty International and the like.

The humor, absurd and pathetic of life in general are constants in JM Folon's work; his simple drawing lines and his pastel colors in soft degradé are his mark. Poetry is the result.

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