HELSINKI (AP) — Carl Fredrik Reutersward, one of Sweden’s best-known modern artists and the creator of the iconic statue of a revolver barrel tied in a knot, has died at the age of 81.

The artist, who was a major influence in the modern Swedish art scene, died in a hospital in Helsingborg, southwestern Sweden, on Tuesday evening, Thomas Millroth from the Carl Fredrik Reutersward Art Foundation said.

He gave no cause of death, but Reutersward, who suffered a stroke in 1980, was known to have been unwell for some time.

“He was instrumental in establishing contacts with the art scene in New York where everything was happening at an important time,” said Daniel Birnbaum, director of Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, adding that Reutersward’s circle of friends included Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and his works were exhibited in various museums, including MOMA in New York City in the 1970s.

“(He) was close friends with American artist of his generation, but was a very European artist himself and, I think, was perceived as such by his U.S. friends,” Birnbaum said. “He was obviously better known in the world than we have understood here in Sweden.”

Born in 1934 in Stockholm, Reutersward was a poet as well as a painter and sculptor who studied in Paris in 1951 under Fernand Leger, the French painter and sculptor widely regarded as a forerunner to pop art.

He held his first exhibition the following year in Paris, but returned to Sweden to continue his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where he held a professorship in painting in 1965-69 until he moved to Switzerland.

The twisted gun statue, which he called “Non Violence,” became an international symbol of peace the world over. One version sits outside the U.N. building in New York, with others in various cities around the world.

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