ART CITIES:Stockholm-Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd

Playful and multifaceted, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd’s career spanned nearly 7 decades, several pseudonyms, and most artistic techniques. The exhibition “Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd Alias CFR” focuses in part on the intricate installation and group of objects, ”Kilroy”, and in part on a series of monumental, expressive drawings the artist made after suffering a stroke in 1989 which forced him to switch from working with his right hand to his left.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Moderna Museet Archive

Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd (CFR) 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. CFR held his first exhibition in Paris in 1952. He returned to Sweden and studied from 1952 to 1955 at the Art Academy of Stockholm. From the late-1950s through the 1960s, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd was part of a vibrant Avant-Garde art scene that has to some extent become synonymous with the early years of Moderna Museet. Already by its inauguration in 1958, Reuterswärd appeared at Moderna Museet with his performance/happening ”Dialogue with Fox, Physical Exchange”, where he appeared well-dressed, on stage and conducted a conversation with a fox. He was one of a number of artists such as Öyvind Fahlström, Ilmar Laaban, and Åke Hodell who (inspired by others such as Fluxus, Dada, Marcel Duchamp, and John Cage) worked with most of the forms of expression available to an artist. Under the pseudonym of Charlie Lavendel, Reuterswärd took part in a Fluxus event arranged by Bengt af Klintberg in March of 1963 at Alléteatern, a theater in Stockholm. His contribution to the experimental art performance was to hide in the dark with his friend Daniel Kallós and spray lavender oil throughout the theater, which caused everyone in the audience to fall asleep. Earlier the same year, Reuterswärd auctioned off a ten-kilo pike fish at Moderna Museet. The artist and satirist Lars Hillersberg bid for the fish by drunkenly shouting “Denmark!”. In 1962, the year before his holiday announcement was published in the ”New York Herald Tribune”, Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd had read “Kilroy was here” on a wall in New York, The phrase can be traced back to the Second World War when American soldiers wrote it wherever they happened to be. Reuterswärd saw Kilroy as both everyone and no one, a text written for anyone. ”Kilroy” (1963-72) began in January 1963, when Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd published the following notice in the New York Herald Tribune: “CARL FREDRIK REUTERSWÄRD Closed for holidays 1963–1972.” He intended to use this vacation to create nine interrelated objects under the collective title of ”Kilroy”. It is a poetic and simultaneously ambiguous and esoteric group of works, and in the exhibition you meet objects, as well as lasers and sketches related to the work. In 1989 Reuterswärd suffering a stroke that forced him to switch from working with his right hand to his left. He described the time after his stroke as in part a kind of liberation. He began drawing with his left hand, and the lines and subjects seem to suggest a searching both back and forward in time, to before and after the stroke. The monumental oil pastel drawings of the late 1990s feature scenes of, among others, mythological figures and acrobatic displays. They are mysterious and dreamlike, and although the expression here appear different from that of the earlier conceptual exercises, the two are also linked by the artist’s continual exploration of new styles and approaches. Laser (1971): Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd was an early adopter of new technology such as lasers and holograms. Using lasers allowed him to expand the sculptural object and its expressive potential to become both material and immaterial, both enduring and fleeting. Reuterswärd started using laser as early as 1962 to create more enduring poetical works in the series, for example the Perspex discs with the laser-engraving “KILROY”. It was the engineer Billy Klüver who showed Reuterswärd how to work with laser. “My mental perception changed. Here was the tool that broke with all traditions!”, Reuterswärd wrote later. This exhibition includes Hans Hammarskiöld’s photographs, as well as lasers and a hologram related to ”Kilroy”. Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd was a friend of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. After the tragic death shooting of John Lennon, Carl Fredrik was asked by Yoko Ono to create an artistic tribute to John and his vision of a peaceful world. Carl Fredrik created the knotted gun sculpture and named it “Non-Violence” (1982). The first sculpture was placed outside the UN headquarters in New York in 1988. The knotted gun barrel can be interpreted as a pacifist statement with humorous elements, as well as a mockery of supposedly hard manliness with its transformation of a weapon into a soft and pliant organ. The knot can also be read as a reminder – to remember to never use violence, never wage war. After his stroke, Reuterswärd continued to draw different versions of the revolver, but the shapes and lines are softer, more fragile and simultaneously more complex.

Info: Curator: Andreas Nilsson, Moderna Museet, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm, Duration: 14/9-11/10/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Thu 10:00-18:00, Fri 10:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-18:00, www.modernamuseet.se