Swedish sculptor of twisted gun barrel
HELSINKI — Carl Fredrik Reutersward, one of Sweden’s best-known modern artists and the creator of the iconic statue of a revolver barrel tied in a knot, has died at the age of 81.
Theartist, whowas a major influence in the modern Swedish art scene, died in a hospital in Helsingborg, southwestern Sweden, on Tuesday evening, Thomas Millroth, from the Carl Fredrik Reutersward Art Foundation, said. He gave no cause of death, but Reutersward, who suffered a stroke in1980, was known to have been unwell for some time.
“He was instrumental in establishing contacts with the art scene in New York where everything was happening at an important time,” said Daniel Birnbaum, director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, adding that Reutersward’s circle of friends included Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and his works were exhibited in various museums, including MOMA in New York City in the 1970s.
“(He) was close friends with American artist of his generation, but was a very European artist himself and, I think, was perceived as such by his U.S. friends,” Birnbaum said. “Hewas obviously better known in the world than we have understood here in Sweden.”
Born in 1934 in Stockholm, Reutersward was a poet aswell as a painter and sculptor, who studied in Paris in 1951 under Fernand Leger, the French painter and sculptor widely regarded as a forerunner to pop art. He held his first exhibition the following year in Paris but returned to Sweden to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm where he held a professorship in painting in 1965-1969 until he moved to Switzerland.
Reutersward, who became acquainted with John Lennon and Yoko Ono in Switzerland in 1969, was shocked by the 1980 shooting of the former Beatle.
“I was filled with bitterness and anger and immediately began to create a symbol for John Lennon and everyone else who has been a victim of such assassins,” he wrote after Lennon was shot outside his apartment in New York.
The twisted gun statue, which he called “Non Violence,” became an international symbol of peace the world over.