The Los Angeles artist, whose collages of printed metal shards and thousands of nails made him a signature figure of 1960s West Coast Pop, has died, his gallery L.A. Louver has confirmed.
Tony Berlant, the Los Angeles artist associated with the West Coast Pop movement of the 1960s, has died at the age of 85. ARTnews, citing a report in the Los Angeles Times, said his longtime gallery, L.A. Louver, confirmed the death. Berlant was best known for large-scale collages assembled from shards of printed metal and thousands of nails, often built from vintage metal signs and occasionally enriched with found objects. In recent years he had begun printing personal photographs onto the metal grounds of his works, giving them an autobiographical dimension.
Born in New York City in 1941, Berlant moved with his family to Los Angeles at the age of five and studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, graduating in 1961 before earning master's degrees in painting and sculpture in 1962 and 1963. His early Pop-inflected works featured real clothing painted with enamel and glued to canvas, but by 1964 he had turned to the material that would define his career: found metal signage collaged onto flat surfaces and onto three-dimensional forms such as houses and cubes. Between 1962 and 1966 he 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, and he began showing with L.A. Louver in 1984.
Beyond his studio practice, Berlant was a collector of Native American art and artifacts, an interest that grew to include Mimbres pottery from southwestern New Mexico and prehistoric stone tools. He was a founding member of the Mimbres Foundation, a conservancy group, and in 2018 published two books: First Sculpture: Handaxe to Figure Stone, co-authored with anthropologist Thomas Wynn and issued by the Nasher Sculpture Center, and Decoding Mimbres Painting: Ancient Ceramics of the American Southwest, written with Evan Maurer and Julia Burtenshaw. Berlant lived in Santa Monica, California. He is survived by his wife, the performance artist and set designer Helen Méndez; his daughter, the comedian and actress Kate Berlant; and his brother, Jeff Berlant. The details here are drawn from the ARTnews report, and no cause of death was given in it.
