Acclaimed contemporary Indigenous Australian artist Gordon Bennett has died of natural causes at 58. He will be remembered as one of Australia’s most critically engaged and innovative artists. A statement from Brisbane’s Milani Gallery says that his sudden death comes at a time when the artist was finding new audiences internationally, most recently through this year’s Berlin Biennale and dOCUMENTA 13 in 2012.

Bennett is best known for exploring issues of identity and culture through the appropriation of imagery and stylistic elements from famous artists including Jackson Pollock, Piet Mondrian, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 1995 he created a Pop Art inspired alter ego, John Citizen, which he described as “an abstraction of the Australian Mr. Average, the Australian Everyman.” His most famous series, “Notes to Basquiat,” was conceived as a “dialogue” between himself and the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat with whom he shared an interest in Western Culture as well as drawing, semiotics, and visual language.

“[Bennett] resisted categorization of his work as Aboriginal art at a time when it would have been easier to acquiesce to institutional pressure, or framing by popular media,” according to a statement from Milani Gallery. “He believed that art’s real power lay in its potential to communicate directly with its receiver. These positions were rooted in his sense of humanism, based on the hope of mutual respect.”

Bennett’s work is collected widely and is represented in major public art collections within Australia as well as a number of international collections. A previously unexhibited series of thirty works on paper from the early 1990s entitled “Notepad Drawings” is currently being exhibited as part of the 8th Berlin Biennale.