Anthony Caro, a giant of post-war sculpture who could imbue panels and beams of steel with astounding depth and character while constantly questioning and expanding the medium’s formal vocabulary, has died at the age of 89 after suffering a heart attack on Wednesday, the BBC reports. His work, which could range from playful and bright pieces covered in colorful hues to darker, weightier works that retained their raw steel surfaces, had been the subject of major museum exhibitions the world over, from the Yale Center for British Art earlier this year and the Metropolitan Museum’s rooftop in 2011 (pictured) to a major retrospective at Tate Britain in 2004 and at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975.

Born in Surrey on March 8, 1924, Caro majored in engineering at Cambridge and, after a stint in the Royal army, studied sculpture at Regent Street Polytechnic and then the Royal Academy Schools. When he graduated in 1952 his work tended to be more figurative, and he spent some time working as an assistant in Henry Moore’s studio. He continued to teach art, at London’s St Martin’s School of Art, from 1953 until 1982. After gaining some visibility in the late 1950s, he devoted himself to abstraction beginning in the 1960s, and a major show at Whitechapel Gallery in 1963 jump-started his career.

Caro’s accolades are too numerous to list, but he was knighted in 1987, featured in official exhibitions at three different Venice Biennales — including in 1999, when his 25-part sculptual installation “The Last Judgment” was shown — and received the Order of Merit in 2000.

“Anthony Caro was one of the outstanding sculptors of the past fifty years alongside David Smith, Eduardo Chillida, Donald Judd and Richard Serra,” Tate director Nicholas Serota said in a statement released by Caro’s family. “In the sixties he established a new language for sculpture in a series of elegant, arresting, abstract steel sculptures placed directly on the ground. His development of this vocabulary, building on the legacy of Picasso, but introducing brilliant colour and a refined use of shape and line, was enormously influential in Europe and America. Caro admired the sculpture of ancient cultures and Greece and from the eighties onwards produced a series of large scale abstract works that reflected a continuing interest in the human body, but also a growing fascination with architecture. Caro was a man of great humility and humanity whose abundant creativity, even as he approached the age of ninety, was still evident in the most recent work shown in exhibitions in Venice and London earlier this year.”