Tony Berlant with elements of his work The Marriage of New York and Athens (1966–68), at the installation of the show “West! Frank Gehry and the Artists of Venice Beach,” 2005, at the Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis.Duane Braley/Star Tribune via Getty Images.

Tony Berlant, Artist Known for Cut Metal Collages, Dies at 85

by · ARTnews

Artist Tony Berlant has died at 85, reports the Los Angeles Times. L.A. Louver, his longtime gallery, confirmed the death.

Berlant, who was associated with the West Coast Pop art movement of the 1960s, was best known for large-scale collages made of shards of printed metal and thousands of nails. He often worked with vintage metal signs and occasionally added found objects to his pieces. In recent years, he had begun printing personal photographs onto the collages’ metal grounds, adding an autobiographical dimension to the works.

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Berlant was born in New York City in 1941 and moved with his family to LA when he was five. After graduating from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1961, he went on earn master’s degrees in painting and sculpture in 1962 and 1963. His Pop-inflected works from the early ’60s featured real clothing painted with enamel and glued to canvases; by 1964, however, Berlant had moved on to his signature material, collaging pieces of found metal signage onto flat surfaces and three-dimensional shapes such as houses and cubes.

These works gained him early attention; between 1962 and 1966, Berlant was included in exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Whitney Museum in New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He began showing with L.A. Louver in 1984.

In addition to his art practice, Berlant was a collector of Native American art and artifacts, an interest that grew to include Mimbres pottery from southwestern New Mexico (he was a founding member of the Mimbres Foundation, a conservancy group) and prehistoric stone tools. His books First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone (Nasher Sculpture Center), coauthored with anthropologist Thomas Wynn, and Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest (Prestel), written in collaboration with Evan Maurer and Julia Burtenshaw, were both published in 2018.

Berlant lived in Santa Monica, California. He is survived by his wife, performance artist and set designer Helen Méndez; his daughter, comedian and actress Kate Berlant; and a brother, Jeff Berlant.