Tony Berlant, artist known for large-scale found-metal collages and comic Kate Berlant's dad, dies at 85
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Set us as preferred Tony Berlant, a seminal influence in the West Coast Pop Art movement of the 1960s, died Tuesday after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease.He was 85.
L.A.Louver, his longtime gallery, confirmed his death to The Times.
Berlant, a “painterly collage artist” who called Santa Monica his home for many decades, developed a signature style making collages using shards of printed tin instead of paper and thousands of shiny nails instead of glue.He often worked with vintage metal street signs and ads.
In recent years, he printed personal photographs onto the metal, giving the colorful works story structure and an autobiographical bent.One of his most recent shows, in fall 2018 at Hollywood’s Kohn Gallery, featured cut metal collages that blended elements of assemblage, Pop Art and abstraction.He was also known for his metal cube sculptures, which have been called quilt-like.
Entertainment & Arts Tony Berlant has been a busy man lately.Berlant was a collector of both ancient Southwest pottery and Paleolithic stone objects.
In fact, he co-curated two museum exhibitions: “First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone” at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and “Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest” at LACMA.He was also a founding member of the Mimbres Foundation, an archaeological conservancy that studies and preserves ancient Native American pottery.Berlant was part of L.A.’s famous Ferus Gallery art scene in the 1960s, a group of “Cool School” artists that also included the late Ed Moses and Robert Irwin as well as Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell and others.
The Ferus Gallery was a revolving door of experimentation at the time and helped fuse the city’s otherwise sprawling and disparate art scene.Berlant was part of one of the earliest museum exhibitions of ...