Artdaily_ The Long Beach Museum of Art is pleased to present, Brilliant Earth: The Ceramic Sculpture of Tony Marsh, a landmark survey of the artist’s work spanning 1982 to present. This exhibition, which began on October 23rd, features works—some that have never been in public view—from his early series: Water, Marriage, Fertility and Creation Vessels—through his most recent and ongoing series Crucibles and Cauldron, aptly named after instruments formed with fire. Marsh pays homage to what pottery has always been required to do—hold, preserve, commemorate, ritualize and beautify. The work is spurred by curiosity, risk-taking and restless exploration.
Tony Marsh [b. 1954, New York, NY] is a sculptor and ceramicist based in Long Beach, California. Marsh’s ceramic forms of the past dozen years emerge from his intensive study of ceramic material behavior and thermal adversity, ranging from the topographic and heavily textured surfaces of his Cauldrons and Crucibles series to the vibrant and lustrous glazes of his Spill and Catch works. Referring metaphorically to both geophysical science and artistic forms of creation, Marsh’s vessels explore the highly transformational nature of these materials by posing an argument between gravity and the flow of molten materials through heating and cooling cycles. There is no note taking in his process, making each work an irreplicable product of multiple firings and intuitive addition or subtraction of surface materials.