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LARS VILKS

Swedish artist Lars Vilks, known for Muhammad cartoon, killed in car accident

Swedish artist Lars Vilks, known for his cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad as well as his huge wooden sculptures, died in a car accident on Sunday.

Published: 4 October 2021 09:48 CEST
Swedish artist Lars Vilks gives a lecture
Swedish artist Lars Vilks, pictured here giving a lecture in 2015, died in a car collision on Sunday. Photo: Maja Suslin/TT

The 75-year-old has lived under police protection due to death threats over his 2007 Prophet Muhammad drawing. He and two police officers were killed in a collision with an oncoming truck, Swedish police confirmed to AFP, and the accident is currently not being treated as suspicious.

“This is being investigated like any other road accident. Because two policemen were involved, an investigation has been assigned to a special section of the prosecutor’s office,” a police spokesperson told AFP, adding that there was no suspicion of foul play.

The accident occurred near the small town Markaryd when the car Vilks was travelling in crashed into an oncoming truck. Both vehicles caught fire and the truck driver was sent to hospital for treatment, according to police. In a statement, the police said the cause of the accident was unclear.

“The person we were protecting and two colleagues died in this inconceivable and terribly sad tragedy,” said regional police head Carina Persson.

Vilks had been under police protection since 2010, after his cartoon of Muhammad with a dog’s body published in Swedish newspapers three years earlier prompted outrage among those who consider depictions of the Muslim prophet deeply offensive or blasphemous. Al-Qaeda offered a $100,000 reward for Vilks’ murder.

The depiction also sparked diplomatic friction, with Sweden’s then prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt meeting ambassadors from several Muslim countries to ease tensions. In 2015, Vilks survived a gun attack at a free-speech conference in Copenhagen that left a Danish film director dead.

While the Muhammad drawing is what Vilks was best known for internationally, he was primarily a sculptor.

His most significant work is the driftwood sculpture Nimis, which he began building in a Skåne national park in 1980.

This work was also not without controversy; Vilks built it illegally without acquiring a permit, sparking a legal dispute with local authorities who demanded it be destroyed. The artist sold both Nimis and a second artwork, and although he was fined for building them, and Nimis was badly damaged in a 2016 fire, they remain largely standing today.

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LARS VILKS

Notorious Lars Vilks artwork burned down in Sweden

Police are investigating suspected arson after a fire in southern Sweden saw much of, equally famous and infamous, artist Lars Vilks' life's work burned to the ground on Thursday evening.

Published: 25 November 2016 07:37 CET
Notorious Lars Vilks artwork burned down in Sweden
Lars Vilks and the blaze. Photo: Vesa Moilanen/Lehtikuva/AP & Björn Lindgren/TT

Internationally, Swedish artist Lars Vilks may be most known for his controversial cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad as a dog in 2007, which has made him the target of a string of assassination plots, forcing him to live in a secret location and national security service police to guard him round the clock.

But in Sweden, he is also closely associated with Nimis, a maze-like wooden rebel land art installation culminating in huge statues erected on the north-west peninsula Kullaberg of southern region Skåne.

Around a fourth of the construction was completely destroyed in the Thursday blaze.

“The tower closest to the water has burned down completely. But around 75 percent of the artwork is still there,” Mattias Johansson of the Fire and Rescue Services, who were called to the scene shortly before 7pm, told the TT news agency.


The fire at Nimis, with some of the towers still standing. Photo: Björn Lindgren/TT

Vilks himself said that the destruction of the sculpture was all part of the art.

“I have my motto 'everything is an advantage'. You always have to find something optimistic and art that's subjected to violence always benefits from it, you have to comfort yourself with that,” he said.

“It gets interesting when things are happening. When you attack artworks it gets interesting. A work of art that nobody cares about, it disappears. This is tough action and a rather brutal form of art critique.”

Nimis has been destroyed before – burned down in other attacks or blown down in harsh storms – and Vilks has kept maintaining it for the past three decades. However, he has lived under police protection since a shooting at a Copenhagen cultural centre last year, and now gets help from volunteers.

“I can't get out the way I have done before. I live under protection and Nimis is a risk target, and after this fire I assume it's considered and even greater risk, so I have to rely on my assistants,” he told TT.

Vilks said he believed the fire was started by either those opposed to Nimis itself or those opposed to his cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad. Police have not commented on this, but are treating it as suspected arson.

“There were times when they were at it constantly, there were constant attacks. But it has established itself as a fairly quiet tourist attraction, so things seemed pretty cool,” he said.


Lars Vilks in front of Nimis in 1999. Photo: Stefan Lindblom/TT

Vilks first started building Nimis in the 1980s – the only land art installation of its kind in Sweden – using drive wood from the sea. When authorities discovered the sculptures in 1982, a long-winded judicial process was launched to get it taken down.

Instead, it grew, both in size and in popularity – the towers measure around 25 metres tall, around 160,000 nails are believed to have gone into the project, and more than 30,000 people visit the spot every year.