(b Stockholm, 4 June 1934). Swedish painter, printmaker and laser artist. He studied in Paris at Fernand Léger’s studio (1952). His work was linked in the 1950s and 1960s with that of Öyvind Fahlström in its random calligraphy of words and phrases and serially arranged signs; each artist shared an interest in merging painting, poetry and theatre. During the 1960s the Moderna Museum, Stockholm, was the setting for a number of contemporary international exhibitions and avant-garde events, where Reuterswärd mounted several mixed-media Happenings. In his work Mascot for ‘Movement in Art’ (1960) he bound a tailor’s dummy to a chair and later had it cast in bronze. From 1965 he taught at the Kungliga Akademi för de Fria Konsterna, Stockholm, and in the same year began his pioneering experiments in the use of laser beam (see LASER) and holography. A retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, in 1968. In summer 1972, at the Moderna Museum, he presented Kilroy Project (1963–72), which involved holographed images together with such objects as a mirror, a bronzed heart, a silver ladder, a parachute and a constantly moving laser delineating the perimeter of the blacked-out room. In the 1970s, dismayed by the manipulations of the international art market, he launched Art for Gold (1973–7), a series of paintings and sculptures featuring the oversized signatures of famous artists (e.g. The Great Fetish, Picasso, Sleeping Partner, steel and bronze, 1974–7; Düsseldorf, Städt. Ksthalle). His humour and his fondness for a kind of artistic brinkmanship were perpetuated in the Inter-Figures (1983) series, a metaphysical meditation on the ‘silent’ spaces between letters and figures, which took plastic form in small, carved and oiled wood sculptures, twisted metal and charcoal drawings.

• Reuterswärd, Carl Fredrik
  • Laser
  • Sweden, §III, 4: Painting and graphic arts, after c 1900