Peter Agostini, a figurative sculptor whose works were widely exhibited, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 80 years old.
His daughter Diane Agostini Whelan said he died of a heart ailment combined with diabetes.
Mr. Agostini had more than 25 one-man shows devoted to his work in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, and his sculptures were included in more than 100 group shows around the world.
Although first known as an Abstract Expressionist sculptor, in the 1960's he helped establish the Pop Art movement by creating plaster casts of beer cans, light bulbs, sausages, egg crates, pillows and balloons that were exhibited with similar works by Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.
Despite these interests, Mr. Agostini never abandoned the traditional subjects of sculpture like the human head and figure, and particularly the horse. His last show, called "Horses," was presented by the Olaf Clasen Gallery on Greene Street in SoHo in 1991.
At that time, Mr. Agostini said his powerful and long-legged models of horses had been influenced by the works of Donatello and Verrocchio, but especially by Tang Dynasty tomb sculptures found in China. Works That Puzzled Many
His creations consistently entranced the critics but also puzzled them. Reviewing his work in 1964, John Canaday wrote in The New York Times, "Mr. Agostini, a sort of short-order Bernini (there is no way to avoid the rhyme), consistently delights me in spite of the fact that I would find it easier to pick him to pieces than to say exactly where the source of this delight lies, a perplexity that I regard as an accolade."
A decade later, The Times art critic Hilton Kramer also called Mr. Agostini "a puzzle."
"In terms of the talent, energy, imagination and sheer authority he brings to the sculptural medium, he belongs in the first rank," Mr. Kramer wrote. "Yet the work he produces, though extremely beautiful and often original in many ways, somehow denies him a place among our major sculptors."
The critic Carl Goldstein, writing for Arts Magazine in 1986, was unqualified in his praise, declaring that Mr. Agostini's work demonstrated that "traditional modeling still can move us and make us dream."
Mr. Agostini was born in New York in 1913. His only formal training in art was at the Leonardo da Vinci Art School in 1935 and 1936. Later, he taught sculpture and painting at the New York Studio School, Columbia University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the Parsons School of Design.
His works are included in many major public and private art collections, among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
In addition to his daughter Diane, of New York, Mr. Agostini is survived by another daughter, Celine Y. Burch of Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J.; a sister, Anna Buffalo of Oxford, N.Y., and four granddaughters.