CF Reuterswärd

Born in Stockholm, Sweden 1934-2016

Studies –

Ecole Fernand Léger 1951-1952

The Royal College of Art, Stockholm 1952-1955

Professorship at the Royal College of Art, Stockholm 1965

Board Member of the acquisitions committee at the Moderna Museet, Stockholm 1966-1970

Awarded the Prince Eugen Madalion by the Swedish king 1984

Inauguration of the first Non-Violence sculpture at the United Nation´s Headquarters in New York 1988 

Takes the initiative to the creation of the Non-Violence Project 1995

The Non-Violence Project receives the Daily Points of Light Award, a US Presidential award for best community work in the USA 2000 

Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd was born in Stockholm in 1934. His artistic career started already at the age of fourteen, and a few years later he set out for Paris and the Art School of Fernand Legér. Carl Fredrik held his first exhibition in Paris in 1952. He returned to Sweden and studied from 1952 to 1955 at the Art Academy of Stockholm. A long period of study tours all over Europe then followed. For a few years Carl Fredrik held a chair at the Stockholm Art Academy, which he finally left to settle down in Bussigy in Switzerland in 1969.

Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd is extremely creative and always want to find new ways and modes of expression for his creativity. This became very obvious when after a stroke he had to start working with his left hand and something he has managed very well.

Carl Fredrik is one of very few Swedish artists who have acquired international fame, and he has held exhibitions in many museums and galleries, all over Europe as well as in the United States. Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd is represented in most museums and important private collections of modern art.

About the Non Violence sculpture

Non-Violence – or “the knotted gun” as it is known to many in this house – is familiar to literally millions of people. For those who come to visit United Nations headquarters in New York, it is usually the first thing they see. After they leave, it is often the thing they remember best. Through postcards and snapshots, it has become well known even to many who have never set foot in New York. That is not only because of the striking image of the work of art itself. It is also because the sculpture expresses, perhaps more clearly than any other single item, what the United Nations stands for: our commune mission to defeat the forces of violence and hatred which exist in our world; our perpetual struggle to confront the worst in man with the best in man.

With Non-Violence, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd has not only endowed the Union Nations with a cherished work of art; he has enriched the consciousness of humanity with a powerful symbol. It is a symbol that encapsulates, in a few simple curves, the greatest prayer of man: that which asks not for victory, but for peace.

Kofi A Annan , New York, 1 September 2001