Sigmar Polke, the stylistically protean German painter whose work helped revitalize his nation’s floundering avant garde in the decades following World War II, died today from complications with cancer, according to Michael Werner Gallery, which represents him in New York.

In 1963, with compatriots Gerhard Richter and Konrad Lueg, Polke founded the Capitalist Realism movement, among the first major contemporary-art groups to emerge in postwar Germany. A generation younger than sculptor Joseph Beuys, the members of the group eschewed that artist's direct, radical politics to instead create work that ironically depicted everyday life, leading many commentators to link them with the American Pop artists.

Polke was born in Oelsnitz, Germany in 1941. He later left East Germany with his family, eventually settling in Dusseldorf, which would in time become the first site of a Capitalist Realism exhibition. Leug later changed his name to Konrad Fischer and opened a gallery in that city in 1967, becoming one of the era’s seminal art dealers and a staunch Polke supporter.

After pursuing an apprenticeship in glass painting, Polke enrolled at the Dusseldorf Art Academy in 1961, studied through 1967, continuing his education even as his art career gained increasing attention. Like New York painter Roy Lichtenstein, Polke was fascinated by the tools and techniques of advertising and often incorporated Ben-Day dots in his paintings and prints, aping the technology of mass-printed ads.

Though most of his work took the form of painting, Polke also produced a series of conceptual text-based works that seemed to mock the tenets of that movement in the 1960s. His 1967 Losungen V, for example, listed a series of incorrect math equations, like “1+1=3.” Art historian Benjamin Buchloh wrote of that output: “[B]oth abstraction’s historical failure and the preposterousness of its radical promises in the present day became the target of Polke’s sardonic and allegorical humor.”

Despite those ironic tendencies expressed early in his career, Polke in later decades enthusiastically devoted himself to making unashamedly lush, expressive paintings and prints that brazenly mix abstraction and figuration. In a 2007 profile, Carol Vogel noted that the artist's wide-ranging materials included arsenic, lavender oil, meteor dust, gold, cinnabar, and violet. “Violet has had mystical properties since the Renaissance, which has always fascinated Sigmar,” gallerist Gordon VeneKlasen told Vogel. In his most recent New York show, at Michael Werner last year, Polke displayed paintings from his “Lens” series, composed of drippy, paint-soaked fabric that was coated with ridged plastic.

Reviewing the “Lens” show, art critic Roberta Smith wrote: “Sigmar Polke is like Robert Ryman, only crazy. He is fixed, seemingly, on one thing — how (and with what) paintings can be made, from the ground up — but he is polymorphous and perverse.” That word — perverse — was often used to describe his work, which brought bravura technical experiments to bear on paintings that were deeply rooted in Polke's love for the history of the medium. In a 2006 review, art critic Michael Kimmelman was even more awed than Smith, writing: “Painting is man's oldest conjuring trick. And Sigmar Polke is one of its reigning magicians, a mercurial master, gleefully perverse.”

Despite that critical adulation, some experts hold that his work has been under-appreciated in recent years in comparison with that of his contemporaries. In an interview last month, Sotheby’s worldwide contemporary art head Tobias Meyer argued that Polke’s work had long been undervalued. “There’s no complete catalogue raisonne of the artist,” he told Alexandra Peers of the Observer, saying that “people will realize how little there is” when his oeuvre is reevaluated in coming years.