The cause was cancer, according to a family statement shared by his studio. Mr. Marden, who was diagnosed with rectal cancer in 2017, was painting as recently as Saturday, preparing for a planned November exhibition at one of Gagosian’s New York galleries.

A master of color, light and texture, Mr. Marden was first known for his mysterious monochrome canvases, the centerpiece of his New York debut in 1966 at the fledgling Bykert Gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Like Jasper Johns, whose works he had studied while working part-time as a security guard at the Jewish Museum, Mr. Marden mixed his oils with melted beeswax, applying the thick paint with spatulas and knives to create a matte surface on the canvas. Within a few years, he was incorporating multiple panels and color combinations into his works, which he likened to musical chords in which one note, or color, played off the next.

His early paintings were often gray, although the color seemed to shift depending on the light. Some were inspired by his trips to Greece, where he would take detailed notes on the color of the sea, the sky or an olive grove that happened to catch his eye: “evasive silver gray green, blue gray green light, black gray browns.”

While his monochrome paintings were resolutely abstract, their titles were far more concrete. “The Dylan Painting,” a work of purplish gray, suggested his association with Bob Dylan and other 1960s folk musicians whom he knew through his marriage to Pauline Baez, the older sister of singer Joan Baez. A work named “Nebraska” was inspired by a drive past Midwestern prairies. “For Helen” was based on the dimensions of artist Helen Harrington, whom he later married (the canvas matched her height and shoulder width), with a pinkish color inspired by a pair of her shoes.

“People were saying painting was dead. And this was my way of thinking, well, there are things that haven’t been done,” he told Harry Cooper, the head of modern art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, in 2009.

Although he was often associated with the minimalist art movement, Mr. Marden’s paintings had a mythic quality that eluded labels. Reviewing a 2006 retrospective of his work at the Museum of Modern Art, New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl called Mr. Marden “the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades,” comparing the effect of a Marden painting to that of a color-field work by Mark Rothko, the painter who said he aimed to conjure a mood of “the single human figure, alone in a moment of utter immobility.”

When he grew bored with his early monochrome style, Mr. Marden pushed his work in new directions, alternately working on bigger and smaller scales. He incorporated 18 interconnected panels in his painting “Thira,” completed in 1980, which alluded to the architecture of ancient Greek temples. He also turned to nature for his tools, drawing with ink-dipped ailanthus twigs from his backyard in New York, and with a three-foot-long stick that he used to make sweeping gestural marks on larger canvases.

Beginning in the late 1980s, he worked on a series of paintings, drawings and etchings called “Cold Mountain,” inspired by the Zen writings of the Chinese poet Hanshan. Mr. Marden read the poems in translation and studied the original Chinese characters, drawing on their structure and arrangement for his own calligraphic pieces, which were filled with looping lines and squiggles that unspooled like a spider’s web, crossing and recrossing the canvas. At times he would “erase” the lines, painting white over black to leave ghostly markings in the background.

“Ultimately I’m using the painting as a sounding board for the spirit,” his gallery, Gagosian, quoted him as saying. “You can be painting and go into a place where thought stops,” he added, “where you can just be, and it just comes out.”

Nicholas Brice Marden Jr. was born in Bronxville, N.Y., on Oct. 15, 1938, and grew up in nearby Briarcliff Manor. His father was a mortgage servicer, his mother a homemaker. One of his neighbors, a painter-turned-advertising-executive, encouraged his interest in art, offering reassurance to Mr. Marden’s parents, who wanted their son to get an Ivy League education.

They “were very concerned that I was going off to lead some horrible, beatnik life,” Mr. Marden said in 2015 in an interview for the Robert Rauschenberg Oral History Project.

Mr. Marden attended Florida Southern College in Lakeland for a year before transferring to Boston University, where he studied painting and spent his weekends visiting galleries and museums in New York, admiring the work of old masters, including Francisco Goya and Francisco de Zurbarán. He graduated with a BFA in 1961 and two years later received an MFA from Yale University, where his teachers included painters Alex Katz and Jon Schueler, and his classmates included future art-world stars Chuck Close, Robert Mangold and Richard Serra.

“When I got to Yale, I painted one self-portrait,” Mr. Marden said, “and that was the last figurative painting I ever did.”

With his first wife, Baez, he moved to New York, taking a shabby apartment on the Lower East Side. For a time they lived with Baez’s parents in Paris, where Mr. Marden frequented museums, carrying his young son Nicholas on his shoulders, and found unexpected inspiration on the streets, where he watched craftsmen apply plaster and stucco to the walls as part of a citywide cleanup project.

As he told it, he was “under the influence of the walls” when he did his first monochrome painting after returning to New York.

“You do something almost by accident, and then you do a lot of work, and you can intellectually justify it,” he said in the oral history. He added that he was also moved by the work of Johns, who had turned recognizable images — most famously, an American flag — into abstractions in his paintings. “I felt I was doing a very similar thing,” Mr. Marden said, “except I had no image.” Instead, he was simply painting a rectangle, in the form of a canvas fitted to rectangular stretchers.

“It was this whole question of, what’s real?,” he continued. “And I felt I was an abstract painter painting real things.”

His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 1968 he married Harrington, in front of witnesses that included art dealer Klaus Kertess and painter Robert Rauschenberg, for whom he worked as a studio assistant. In addition to his wife, Helen Marden, and his son from his first marriage, Nicholas, survivors include two daughters from his second marriage, Mirabelle and Melia Marden; a sister; and two grandchildren.

Beginning in the early 1970s, Mr. Marden worked for part of the year on the Greek island of Hydra. He also had studios in Manhattan, which he decorated with shells, postcards and ancient rocks; in Eagles Mere, Pa., where he worked on fittingly dark paintings from a dimly lit barn; and on the Caribbean island of Nevis, where he and his wife owned a hotel, the Golden Rock Inn.

During a creative low point in the 1980s, he traveled through Thailand, Sri Lanka and India, a journey that deepened his interest in Asian art, reinvigorated his interest in painting and helped spark his “Cold Mountain” works. A later series of large-scale paintings, called “The Propitious Garden of Plane Image,” was partly modeled on a comment from a numerologist friend, who told Mr. Marden that his “number” was 6.

“I was born on the 15th; 1 plus 5 equals 6,” Mr. Marden told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. “I use six panels in these paintings, and each panel is 6 by 4 feet, which is 24, which also adds up to 6. There are six colors and six variations.”

It was perhaps an unusual way to work, he said, but “there are all sorts of ways of getting started on making a painting. You drive through Nebraska and say, ‘Nebraska is beautiful and I’ll make a painting about it.’ This is another way.”

At age 80, in 2018, Mr. Marden unveiled the largest commission of his career, “Moss Sutra With the Seasons,” a five-panel painting that incorporated the monochromatic technique of his early works and was installed in a special gallery at the Glenstone museum in Potomac, Md. It took him five years to complete — a length of time that was perhaps only slightly longer than usual for Mr. Marden, whose studios were often filled with unfinished works, leaning against the walls or perched on a shelf.

Asked by the New York Times how he knew when a piece was finished, he quipped, “When the truck’s out front.”