Tony Marsh: Terra Cognita
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.
The new works extend this investigation while departing noticeably from their predecessors. Where earlier Perforated Vessels were predominantly white and often horizontally oriented, the sculptures in Terra Cognita introduce saturated blues and yellows, pale pinks, and the red-brown warmth of exposed terracotta. Their forms rise vertically, at times assuming an almost figural presence. Several are assembled from stacked components, creating shifting rhythms of compression and expansion as the eye moves upward through the sculpture.
This new formal vocabulary also draws more explicitly on the long history of the vessel. Marsh moves freely between ancient and contemporary references, allowing silhouettes associated with Egyptian alabaster vessels, Greek ceramics, and Chinese celadons to surface without becoming quotation or pastiche. These histories are absorbed into an intuitive process of construction, perforation, and recombination. Familiar forms become unstable as their walls dissolve into networks of openings and their volumes are articulated through light.
This willingness to challenge the internal conventions of his own practice has defined Marsh’s career. Across nearly five decades, he has repeatedly returned to the vessel while altering its most fundamental conditions: removing mass, accumulating surface, inviting chance, imposing control, and allowing a form historically associated with containment to become increasingly open to its surroundings. In Terra Cognita, those inquiries converge. The vessel remains recognizable, but its boundaries have become porous.
