The Italian sculptor Pietro Cascella, who has died at the age of 87, created monumental sculptures for locations as varied as the Auschwitz death camp and Silvio Berlusconi's underground mausoleum. His distinctive, archaic style recalled the art and architecture of the ancient Mediterranean - as he put it, "I was born on the Adriatic and am bound to the world of the south" - but commemorated some characteristically modern phenomena.
Cascella was born in Pescara, in the Abruzzo region of central Italy, where he was trained in an impressive variety of media by his father Tommaso, before taking a more conventional course at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Early successes, notably an appearance at the Rome Quadriennale of 1943, were followed by participation in the Venice Biennale of 1948 and some significant public commissions.
The third-class waiting room at Rome's central station, for which Cascella designed mosaics in 1949 with his first wife Anna Maria Cesarini Sforza, may not have been the most auspicious of starts, but it was followed by much grander projects, notably the ceiling of the Salone delle Riunioni at the ministry of foreign affairs in Rome (1955-56).
Not all of Cascella's work in this period was on such a large scale. Using materials as varied as ceramic, bronze, cement, sand and wire netting, in the 1950s he created a number of small, tactile reliefs, sometimes adorned with surreal, biomorphic forms inspired by his friend, the Chilean artist Roberto Matta. For a few years Cascella became increasingly inventive and unpredictable, even after he received, in 1958, a commission that confirmed his career as a sculptor of large monuments.
His memorial for Auschwitz-Birkenau took nine years to complete. The original design, produced in collaboration with his older brother Andrea and the Spanish architect Julio Lafuente, referred to the railway wagons in which the victims were transported. However, it was eventually succeeded by a less representational, wall-like construction, 50m long (realised with the help of the Italian architect Giorgio Simoncini and the Polish sculptor Jerzy Jarnuszkiewicz).
In the final version, it is the formal contrasts - between horizontal and vertical shapes, smooth surfaces and rough, cyclopean blocks - that give the composition its expressive power. Although there are some anthropomorphic figures, in general it is remarkably abstract, in contrast to the socialist realist style that was then dominant in eastern Europe.
At Auschwitz Cascella had developed an artistic vocabulary that lent itself to other contexts, from the headquarters of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg to Independence Park in Tel Aviv; from grand fountains to celebrations of the Italian resistance or the carabinieri. This solemn style even appears in the works decorating his own home, the castle of Verrucola at Fivizzano in Massa Carrara, Tuscany, to which he moved in 1977. It would perhaps be unjust to say that his large sculptures all look the same, but it is certainly tempting.
Yet at their best, Cascella's creations have an architectural quality that encourages interaction from the viewer and helps them to come alive. As he said of his memorial to Giuseppe Mazzini (1970-74) in the Piazza della Repubblica in Milan: "The most important aspect of my sculpture... is to make people participate in the work, becoming at the same time actors and spectators..." in a square visited by "nursing mothers in the morning, workmen at midday and prostitutes at night, all playing their part".
As well as being theatrical, much of his art has a ritualistic quality. For open-air settings, he made strange, walled structures that look like prehistoric sanctuaries, while smaller carvings, in travertine rock, represented archetypal forms: cosmic bodies, germinating seeds, even women in childbirth. Their simplified, geometric shapes are reminiscent of the abstract sculptor Constantin Brancusi, while also looking distinctly archaic.
This desire to evoke antiquity was memorably expressed in 1985 in the carving Greca, again in travertine, in which a human figure has been absorbed into a column topped by a cornice. Most remarkable of all, however, is the mausoleum, resembling an ancient necropolis, that Cascella created in the early 1990s for Berlusconi at his country house at Arcore, north of Milan. The burial chamber, which contains 36 spaces for Berlusconi, his family and friends, lies beneath 100 tons of abstract sculpture symbolising the vault of heaven. Meanwhile, another room represents objects for the after-life, including keys and a mobile phone - equipment for a modern pharaoh.
A glimpse of the complex can be seen in the recent documentary film Quando c'era Silvio, which opens with a sequence showing a visit by Mikhail Gorbachev. The former Soviet leader looks, at best, bemused.
As Berlusconi is now once again his country's prime minister, he was able to greet the news of Cascella's death with an official tribute, lamenting "the loss of an extraordinary friend" and "one of contemporary sculpture's greatest interpreters".
He is survived by four children, Benedetta, Tommaso, Susanna and Jacopo, and by his wife, the Swiss sculptor Cordelia von den Steinen, whom he met in 1965.
· Pietro Cascella, sculptor, born February 2 1921; died May 18 2008