Abraham Palatnik, an artist who helped spur on a shift toward abstraction in the Brazilian art scene of the mid-20th century, has died at 92. G1, a Brazilian publication, reported that he died of coronavirus-related complications on Saturday in Rio de Janeiro.

Palatnik is widely considered one of the most important Latin American abstract artists for his visually striking arrangements of geometric forms. But, in the United States and Europe, his work historically has not been widely exhibited, though this has recently begun to change.

One of his works from the 1950s, acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art as a gift from Patricia Phelps de Cisneros in 2008, was part of a survey exhibition on the subject that was part of the museum’s reopening shows in October. In his home country of Brazil, however, Palatnik has been the subject of multiple important retrospectives, the most recent of which came in 2017 at the Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil Rio de Janeiro.

Palatnik was among the first Brazilian artists to take up a style called Concretism, which envisioned formalist geometric abstraction as a pure style of art-making that referred to nothing other than itself. 

His art has gone on to be influential for a number of artists working with technology.