Ugo Attardi, who died Thursday at 83, was an Italian artist known for his expressionist canvases and monumental bronzes, which are on display in large cities around the world. One statue, a 16-foot statue of Ulysses, is on exhibit in New York at Battery Park City.

Attardi donated the statue, meant to honor Italians who entered America through Ellis Island, after meeting Governor Pataki when the governor was on a tour of Italy in 1997 with the chairman of the Empire State Development Corp., Charles Gargano. It later emerged that Attardi’s business manager paid a $30,000 bribe to a deputy commissioner of the corporation for international business, Paolo Palumbo, to help place the statue in a prominent location.

Attardi, of Sicilian heritage, was born March 12, 1923, and grew up in Palermo. In 1945, he moved to Rome to pursue a career in art, and joined several other artists to establish “Forma 1,” a movement devoted to reconciling abstract expressionism with Marxism. A landmark group show in 1947 was a contemporary sensation.

Attardi moved away from abstraction toward a more representational sensibility during the 1950s, and his paintings began being featured at the Venice Biennale. In 1961, he was among the founders of “Il Pro e Il Contro,” a group that promoted experimental figurative art. That same year, he won the prestigious Italian Viareggio Prize for fiction for his novel “L’Erede Selvaggio” (“The Savage Heir”).

In the 1960s, Attardi began to turn to classical themes, and produced series of wooden figures called “L’addio Che Guevara” (“The Departure of Che Guevara”) and “L’Arrivo di Pisarro” (“The Arrival of Pizarro”). He later turned to more definitively classical subjects, including the Ulysses at Battery Park City, and a giant statue of Aeneas, which stands in Valletta, port city of Malta.