In the waiting room of doctor Kullmann
Birger Kullmann was an ear, nose and throat specialist in Bergen. In 1928 he got a new waiting room, decorated by Bjarne Lund (1896 - 1931). Six of the paintings were later moved to Sandviken Hospital, where they are now hanging in the auditorium in Building 3. Four of the paintings are rectangular, the other two are shaped at angles to fit the frame of a door.
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The art historican Lise Mjøs called these two pictures Woman in coastal landscape and Girl in outdoor setting. The four large pictures was named Transience, The attributes of medical science, Landscape with mother and child and The past and the future. In the paintings we meet people in different stages of life. An hourglass in Transience suggests that we are perishable. Our bodies will die, just like those of other living beings in nature. But medicine can help us live a better and longer life. In Lund's paintings medicine is represented by the snake and the cup, the symbols of the pharmaceutical profession.
Bjarne Lund bears the mark of having been a student at the André Lhote art school in Paris. The shapes of his paintings are abstract and geometric, but still with figurative motifs. You can find many traces of him in Bergen. Lund was one of the assistants to Axel Revold when he decorated Fresco Hall in the Stock Exchange in Bergen – which is today "Matbørsen", the ”food stock exchange” – in the early 1920s. From 1925 onwards he also decorated Café Boulevard in Olav Kyrre’s Street, as well as Esplanade café and Esplanade confectioner and bodega in the Telegraph building. In 1927 he painted the frescoes in the dispatch hall of the same building.