Non Violence

In 2012, Swedish artist Carl Friedrich Reuterswärd donated some of his work to the sculpture museum in Marl. They held an exhibition in honor of this donation and the sculpture Non Violence was installed on Creiler Platz. This cast bronze revolver with a knotted barrel was designed on the tragic occasion of John Lennon’s assassination in 1980. The artist experimented with a variety of techniques and materials to realize this idea as a simple, universal, and immediately understandable motif to convey his message of non-violence worldwide. The sculpture became the artist’s most famous work, whose multifaceted oeuvre ranges from drawings to experiments with holography and laser technology. The revolver sculpture currently exists in 16 locations worldwide, each with a different knot in the barrel. The first three versions are located in front of the UN headquarters in New York, Malmö, and Luxemburg. Additional examples can be found in Berlin, Caen, Gothenburg, and Stockholm. In Germany, there are also Non Violence sculptures in Hanover, Bayreuth, and this variant with the double knot in Marl.