Tony Berlant, the Los Angeles artist celebrated for collages built from shards of printed tin, has died at 85 after an extended battle with Alzheimer's disease. His longtime gallery, L.A. Louver, announced the death on 29 October. Berlant was a central figure of the 1960s Los Angeles art scene and a pioneer of West Coast Pop, though his work always stood apart from the movement's slicker surfaces.

Born in New York in 1941, Berlant moved to Los Angeles as a child and studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, under the painter Richard Diebenkorn, earning three degrees in three years before teaching in the university's art department from 1965 to 1969. He has been described as a "master of painting without paint": from 1963, tin became his primary medium, gathered first from advertising signs at a corner market near his home and later manufactured to his own designs so he could print his imagery onto the metal and control its colour.

His collages, assembled from pieces of tin hammered onto wood panels with thousands of steel brads, returned obsessively to frames, houses, doorways and windows — motifs he regarded as passages between life and death, and between the secular and the spiritual. He showed with L.A. Louver from 1981, holding 19 solo exhibitions there, and was represented in New York in the 1980s by Xavier Fourcade. Museum surveys included the Whitney Museum in 1973 and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1982, and his work is held by the Hammer Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hirshhorn.

Beyond the studio, Berlant was a devoted collector of Native American art and a scholar of the ancient Southwest. With the anthropologist Steven LeBlanc he founded the Mimbres Foundation, a conservancy protecting sites along New Mexico's Mimbres River, and he co-curated two exhibitions drawn from his collection, at the Nasher Sculpture Center and LACMA, both in 2018. He is survived by his wife, Helen Berlant, his daughter, the comedian and actor Kate Berlant, and his brother, Jeff Berlant.