Dominick Di Meo, an artist who shook up Chicago’s art scene in the 1960s with surreal paintings and collages, only to gain a following far beyond the city late in his career, has died at 97. His death was announced on Sunday by his Chicago gallery, Corbett vs. Dempsey.

Di Meo was among the Chicagoan artists who during the ’60s plotted a new, off-kilter course of art-making that shared little in common with the Pop art and Minimalism emerging from New York. Neither totally abstract nor totally figural, his works from this era were part of an effort to inject new energy into Chicago, whose artistic scene he said was “dead creatively.”