For anyone interested in the long arc of art history, the contemporary art world’s obsession with youth, novelty, and spectacle can be exhausting. A welcome tonic has arrived in the form of a dazzling new show at Los Angeles’s Kohn Gallery that is dedicated to recent work by Tony Berlant.

For most of his life, Tony Berlant has surrendered himself to his obsessions. Aside from making his own large-scale collages from vintage metal street signs and advertisements, the Santa Monica painter and sculptor has spent decades collecting ancient objects made by unknown artists.

Whether in his collage-based art or his activities as collector/scholar/curator of ancient artifacts, Tony Berlant is penetrating into hidden levels of meaning.