New York, NY | albertz benda is pleased to present Terra Cognita, Tony Marsh’s first solo exhibition since his survey at the Long Beach Museum of Art. Opening November 19, the exhibition marks a return to Marsh’s celebrated Perforated Vessel series, a body of work he began developing more than three decades ago. In these new sculptures, Marsh revisits the series transformed by the intervening years, introducing color, verticality, and increasingly complex constructions into forms once defined by restraint and near-monochrome precision.
Marsh has long used the vessel as a site of experimentation rather than a fixed typology. In the Perforated Vessels, he painstakingly removes material from the walls of each form, drilling thousands of individual apertures by hand. There is no predetermined pattern. Each opening responds to the contours of the object as it develops, allowing the surface to emerge through an accumulation of individual decisions. The process turns clay, an inherently dense and opaque material, into something permeable and almost immaterial. As light enters the structure, the vessel begins to describe the space within and around it as much as its own physical mass.