A dental brace, works that connect to Lund Cathedral and monumental paintings by Ylva Snöfrid. At Forum Medicum, Lund University, there are both permanent works created specifically for the site and an art collection put together by the art consultant Anne Pira.
Visitors to the Faculty of Medicine are greeted by Arne Jones’s sculpture Vertikal komposition (Vertical Composition), a replica of a work created in 1952 for the then Department of Physiology, which has a fascinating history of its own. Inside the entrance, in the atrium, the visitor is met by Ylva Snöfrid’s three monumental paintings Kosmos och vanitas i samvetets ljus (Cosmos and Vanitas in the Light of Conscience). Representing birth, life and death, the works were created specifically for the site. These two permanent works by Jones and Snöfrid were produced by the Public Art Agency and inaugurated in 2023.
Art collection focusing on medicine
In Forum Medicum, the Public Art Agency has also placed a collection of around 70 works, selected and put together by the art consultant Anne Pira in collaboration with a consultation group at the faculty. The works were chosen from the Public Art Agency’s collection, they are both older and newly purchased and Anne Pira’s concept is that they are intended to be in analogy with the building, its architecture and contents – that is, the activities carried out at the Faculty of Medicine. Close-ups of bodies can be found, for example, at the top of the building on floor 16. These are photographs by Eva Klasson from the suite La Troisième Angle (The Third Angle) and austere paintings in light and shadow by Disa Rytt, White Diptych.
To the left of the entrance doors, on the way up to the stairs leading to the library, we find a bronze sculpture by Sivert Lindblom. It is simply entitled Sculpture. At first, with its glossy, processed front and rawer back, it appears as something very concrete, but Anne Pira questions whether it really is a front and back. Maybe it is an inside and outside. The visitors can examine this more closely for themselves, it is allowed to touch the sculpture. The tactile is recurring in the collection and according to Anne Pira, the same applies to the dominant visible materials in the architecture – concrete and wood. She regards Lindblom’s sculpture, together with Vanna Bowles’s drawing Abandoned Moments VII, as an entrance to the collection. The drawing is placed on a wall in a diagonal line from the sculpture. Small and square and in pencil, it depicts two people involved in an act that at first glance appears to be a tongue kiss. But what is a kiss and what is a tongue? asks Anne Pira, and draws parallels to the historian of ideas Karin Johannisson’s descriptions of how people in ancient medicine used all their senses, including smell and taste, to make a diagnosis.
The tongue reappears in another work on the same floor. Isabel Theselius’s sculpture Leo in My Mouth includes an embedded photograph of the actor Leonardo di Caprio. He smiles. The sculpture is an enlarged replica of the braces that the artist herself had during her teenage years. Through the shift of the scale, something happens to the memory and the intimacy of the body fitted object, which makes Anne Pira associate to the situation when you pay a visit to the doctor:
– Say aaaah, the doctor says and shines down your throat.
Nina Bondeson’s painting Rosa Elenae and Franco Leidis’s small graphic works Måttagning (Measuring) and Att byta kläder (Changing Clothes) appear to depict people participating in examinations of various kinds, perhaps medical ones. The works connect to the medieval pictorial tradition and thus, also to the iconography in Lund Cathedral.
New encounters create new interpretations
Architecture and art interact at Forum Medicum, both in the permanent works and in the art collection. The atrium forms a pillar of light that stretches through the entire building, which has influenced Anne Pira for the composition of the collection and the placement of the works. She has also taken into account similarities in form and material. Sometimes the works comment on each other. Matts Leiderstam’s photograph Efter bild (Estasi di Santa Teresa) (After Image [Estasi di Santa Teresa]) and Hans Wigert’s painting Maria are such examples. Hanging on different floors but in a vertical line, they can be seen together from the opposite balcony. Such lines or contact surfaces can be found in several places in the building. Sometimes they appear just by chance and create new encounters with art and new interpretations of works. There are also references to art history. For Anne Pira, the yellow-brown veins in the forehead in Hans Wigert’s painting is almost identical to the sky in Edvard Munch’s famous painting The Scream. But here the scream is not horrific, but life-giving, like that of a newborn child.
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The Public Art Agency has also produced two permanent works for Forum Medicum, Vertikal komposition by Arne Jones and Kosmos och vanitas i samvetets ljus by Ylva Snöfrid. This is part of our work with the policy area Designed living environment. You can read more about the works and policy area Designed living environment under related content.
