Peter Nagy, the American artist and gallerist who founded the influential Gallery Nature Morte in New York's East Village and later rebuilt it into one of India's defining contemporary art institutions, has died at the age of 67 after a long illness. His New Delhi-based gallery confirmed the news on 13 October, writing that he had lived exactly as he chose: fearlessly, irreverently and wildly free. In 1982, at 22, Nagy co-founded Gallery Nature Morte with artist Alan Belcher in a small East 10th Street storefront. Over six years the gallery became a flagship of the East Village wave of artist-run spaces, giving early platforms to figures including Sherrie Levine, Louise Lawler, Robert Gober, Gretchen Bender, Steven Parrino and Cady Noland, before closing in 1988. As an artist, Nagy explored the commodification of art and the endless reproduction of images, collaging corporate logos, art-history textbook pictures and museum floor plans and enlarging them on Xerox photocopiers into handmade works that looked machine-made. His Cancer Paintings debuted in 1986, and his later International Survey Condominiums fused art-historical timelines with museum plans. He showed at the 1985 Whitney Biennial and at Documenta in 1987 through the collective Group Material, and his work entered the collections of the Whitney, the Met, the Brooklyn Museum and MOCA Los Angeles. In 1992 Nagy moved to New Delhi, reviving Nature Morte there in 1997 and building it into a pillar of South Asian contemporary art, representing internationally recognised artists including Bharti Kher, Subodh Gupta and Jitish Kallat. He ran the gallery with his partner and co-director Aparajita Jain, and recently moved it into a permanent space in the Gulmohar Park neighbourhood of the Indian capital.