Spanish sculptor Miquel Navarro, whose walk-through installations of imaginary cities made him one of his country's best-known artists, has died at the age of 81. His hometown of Mislata, in Valencia, announced the death and praised a resident it described as a generous person and a world-renowned figure in sculpture.

Navarro's best-known works were his City sculptures, large-scale installations that invited visitors to walk among hundreds of abstract geometric shapes arranged like skyscrapers. The pieces drew on the streets and rooftops of Mislata, the town where he lived and worked, and the imagined cities later became part of real urban landscapes through public commissions in Spain and abroad. He was one of the artists chosen to represent Spain at the 1986 Venice Biennale, and in the same year he received the Spanish Ministry of Culture's National Award for Plastic Arts.

His work is held in the collections of the Guggenheim museums in New York and Bilbao, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. Carlos Fernandez Bielsa, the mayor of Mislata and president of the Fundacio Miquel Navarro, said the town had lost one of its most beloved residents and an irreplaceable creator.

The same memorial column also marked the death of Ursula von Rydingsvard, the sculptor of monumental cedar works, who has died aged 84. Partly inspired by her childhood incarceration in post-war refugee camps, von Rydingsvard carved enormous sculptures from massive cedar beams, including Cedrus, a nearly 20-foot-tall work from 2016 made from 15,000 pounds of wood. Her work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her studio manager, Courtney Childress, described her as a force that pulled people in and kept them orbiting around her.