PYRAMIDS

By Jadran Sturm, 1988-90. Stockholm Sweden. 
Installation with 9 sculptures made of salt, sugar, marble, copper, brass, lead, zinc, bronze and iron.

Jadran was fascinated by Meso-American and Inca pyramids, and built the sculptures in materials chosen for their alchemical and symbolic significance. Five of the sculptures were a combination of a metal and salt or sugar. The other four were; one built with sugar cubes, one built of cut out marble cubes and two cast in iron. 

The sculptures were presented together, arranged across the floor. On a nearby wall, the 12 paintings Labyrinths were exhibited. During this period, Jadran also wrote several texts relating to the themes present in the works Pyramids and Labyrinths.

SIMON DELOBEL (ART HISTORIAN, CURATOR & DIRECTOR KIOSK GHENT) TALKING WITH ÅSA LIE. BRUSSELS, FEBRUARY 28th 2025

Simon Delobel: I'm curious about how the body and intimacy appear in your work. I was struck by a picture in your kitchen, where two people are lying naked on a bed, next to each other, in what I would call a spooning position. You can't see their faces, but I assume it's you and your husband? I've also been thinking about how you represent yourself. I know that both you and Jadran started as individual artists. You made this sculpture, The Cube, which you brought into public space, and its dimensions were based on the size of your own body. Some artists like to create gigantic works, while others stay close to the scale of the human body, or prefer not to expand beyond it.

Åsa Lie: Yes, exactly. Before we worked together, and also in our work as a duo, we have basically stayed on a quite small, human size. Nearly all our works are reachable or readable for a human being. Not monumental. If we talk about the body, oh, there’s a lot. Jadran wrote about the body before we met, but it's difficult to translate from Swedish. I’ll try.

..meat to meta-meat
meat to meat exists outside the named meat
meat is .. not materia
an alienation from the meat to meat does not need to be
it does not exist here or there
it is here and here..

SD: It’s really about the presence

ÅL: Yes... the perfect mistress

SD: The perfect mistress?

ÅL: Yes.
..perfect love in endless loneliness emptiness
always confronted with itself unfaithful thoughts
That’s the last sentence.

SD: Is it a poem?

ÅL: Yes... a kind of poem. A reflection on the body. There’s a conceptual side to it, similar to The Cube, the idea of unity in differences. Not only one and one body in itself, but a shared experience. For me, there’s also an architectural aspect.

SD: The body is an architecture.

ÅL: Exactly, since we talk about body and architecture… When we met he was working on different types of pyramids. It’s interesting that both of us were working with geometrical forms and structures. We were drawn to the intimate, but also to the architectural. So, we worked with these things separately, and later that became something else in our cooperation.