Conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim has died

Some artists work with a single idea or concept for the whole of their career.

Dennis Oppenheim, a pioneering conceptual artist, was not one of them.

"No one is particularly prepared for the kind of artist they become," Oppenheim told art critic Douglas Kelley in a 2009 interview.

"You're there to be thrown around, not only by rambling, interfering concepts but by life itself."

Oppenheim, who died Saturday of liver cancer according to a gallery assistant and close friends, had a creative trajectory that was as adventurous as it was singular.

He was an innovator of several major art movements and a key art-world figure at a time when the boundaries that defined what art could be were being redrawn.

He was one of the first conceptual land artists in the 1960s, and made his mark, too, on the Body Art and conceptual art movements. By the 1980s he was making complex constructions he called "machine works." His art was always eclectic, taking on several manifestations, including installation, performance art and video.

For the last several years, he had become particularly interested in large-scale public works, inventive sculptures that were a synthesis of art and architecture. "Performance Piece," for instance, is a giant brick chimney, twisted into a knot, like something from a cartoon. The work is in Overland Park, Kansas.

"Here was a man who really craved and carved out a new vocabulary in art," said Thomas Solomon, owner of he Thomas Solomon Gallery in Los Angeles and a personal friend of the artist. Solomon, who first confirmed the artist's death for the Journal Sentinel after conflicting reports online, hosted Oppenheim's last U.S. show, an exhibit of early works, last year.

Many Milwaukeeans will remember the New York artist for his "Blue Shirt," a public art project that was commissioned by Milwaukee County but terminated before it was built.

The proposed sculpture of a translucent blue shirt was to adorn the parking garage at Mitchell International Airport. Oppenheim's shirt-shaped sculpture was thought by some to be a condescending reference to the city's blue-collar past, something the artist insisted he never intended.

In interviews with the Journal Sentinel at the time, he praised the sculpture-like building designed by Santiago Calatrava for the Milwaukee Art Museum, and said his work was a response to such trends. He wanted to elevate the human figure, often considered the domain of painters and sculptors, to architectural scale, he said.

The controversy that ensued over "Blue Shirt" was covered coast-to-coast by mainstream media and the art press. It was one of the most controversial works of the artist's career.

In the end, the $220,000 contract, which was to be paid for by the airlines, was terminated ostensibly because a deadline was missed.

Oppenheim is likened to some of the most accomplished avant-garde conceptual artists of the last generation or two, including Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta Clarke and Bruce Nauman. He has exhibited work at galleries and museums around the world, including the Tate Gallery, London; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

He was born in 1938 in Electric City, Washington. He got a bachelor's degree from the California College of the Arts, Oakland, Calif.; and a master's in fine art from Stanford University. He moved to New York in 1966, where he remained until his death.