ArtistSwedish
Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd
2 active items
A bronze revolver with its barrel tied in a knot stands outside the United Nations headquarters in New York, one of the most reproduced peace symbols on earth. Its creator, Carl Fredrik Reutersward, made the sculpture in response to the murder of his close friend John Lennon on December 8, 1980, staying up through the night to twist a firearm into a statement of non-violence. Yoko Ono had asked him for an artistic tribute, and the result transcended personal grief to become a universal icon.
Born in Stockholm in 1934, Reutersward studied with Fernand Leger in Paris in 1951-52 before returning to the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. Leger's bold formal language and commitment to accessible art left a lasting impression, but Reutersward was too restless for any single tradition. Over a career spanning more than six decades, he moved between painting, sculpture, printmaking, holography, and laser art with the curiosity of a true polymath. He was among the first European artists to work extensively with holograms, holding a pioneering solo exhibition at the Museum of Holography in New York in 1978.
His conceptual ambition matched his technical range. The Kilroy Project (1963-1972) was a nine-part work created over ten years using multiple mediums, announced with a notice in the New York Herald Tribune declaring Reutersward "Closed for holidays 1963-1972". The work explored themes of universal identity, later reproduced as holograms in 1977. His paintings and lacquer-on-canvas works pulse with colour and formal invention, held by MoMA, Tate, Centre Pompidou, and Moderna Museet.
As professor of painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm (1965-69) and guest professor at Minneapolis School of Art (1974), Reutersward shaped a generation of Swedish artists. He received the Prince Eugen Medal in 1986, Sweden's highest honour for artistic achievement. The "Non-Violence" sculpture, donated to the United Nations by Luxembourg in 1988, now exists in approximately 30 replicas worldwide, from Berlin to Malmo to Gothenburg. Since 1993 it has served as the official symbol of the Non-Violence Project Foundation.
When Reutersward died in Landskrona in 2016, Moderna Museet mounted the retrospective "Alias: CFR" (2019-2020), confirming his status as one of Sweden's most internationally significant post-war artists.
On Auctionist, 147 Reutersward items are indexed, split between art (52), sculptures (43), paintings (33), and prints (11). Stockholms Auktionsverk handles the largest share through its Magasin 5 and Sickla locations, followed by Bukowskis and Crafoord in Malmo. Paintings and mixed-media works reach SEK 6,000-9,000, while "Non-Violence" serigraphs and polyresin replicas trade around SEK 3,200. For collectors, Reutersward offers both the gravitas of museum-level conceptual art and the accessibility of widely distributed graphic works.