ZT Tosha: Opus Relicarium 2025-26
In Opus Relicarium (2025–2026), Tosha compresses spheres of wool, feathers, and hay beneath tensioned fabric, each concealing a gold-plated egg containing the artist’s hair. Drawing on Byzantine reliquaries, Gothic monstrances, and alchemical vessels, the series transforms bodily trace into inaccessible relics, privileging containment, custody, and historical resonance over visibility. Here, the sacred is not displayed—it is sealed.
ZT Tosha
Title: Black Organon (Folded Pressure Study II)
Material: Black technical fabric,Internal sculptural armature,Small hard sculpted element,Black plinth,Illuminated glass and wood vitrine
Dimensions:
Approx. 50 × 75 × 45 cm –
(Vitrine approx. 90 × 110 × 70 cm)
Year: 2025
With Black Organon (Folded Pressure Study II), ZT Tosha extends his language of compressed anatomies—dense, swollen, and insistently inscrutable. The sculpture sits low within its vitrine, a dark organism caught in a state of arrested expansion. Its bulbous forms press outward against the taut black skin, producing an uncanny sensibility: at once corporeal and mechanical, intimate yet resolutely withheld.
The piece reads as a choreography of pressure. Each tightly stitched seam functions like an incision that simultaneously defines and restrains the body beneath. Tosha’s masterful use of technical fabric—a material associated with protection, performance, and containment—gives the work an unsettling emotional grammar. It evokes musculature under tension, organs negotiating for space, or a creature folding in on itself to survive.
The small protruding form at the top introduces a moment of near-sentience, like a compressed head, sensor, or embryonic limb emerging from a mass that is not yet ready to reveal its architecture. This gesture is subtle but pivotal: it transforms the sculpture from a static object into a being suspended at the threshold of articulation.
The vitrine, illuminated from above, turns the work into a specimen—an artifact extracted from a future biology. Yet its presence frustrates any clinical legibility. Instead, Tosha offers a sculptural riddle, a body that conceals the very logic of its making. By sealing the form within a wooden-framed glass chamber, he amplifies its muteness, treating repression not as a limitation but as a generative force.
In Black Organon, Tosha continues to push his oeuvre toward a poetics of withheld revelation. The work pulses with dense interiority—a silent, pressurized life form caught between emergence and retreat.
Triadic Reliquary (Black Study V)
ZT Tosha
Title: Triadic Reliquary (Black Study V)
Material: Textile, tensioned fabric, wool, feathers, hay, three gold-plated eggs containing the artist’s hair
Dimensions:
Approx. 85 × 85 × 65 cm
Year: 2026
ZT Tosha’s Triadic Reliquary (Black Study V) combines the formal restraint of contemporary sculpture with a lineage reaching back to medieval reliquaries, devotional containers, and hermetically sealed alchemical vessels. Beneath its soft textile exterior, the work is not about pliancy or affect—it is about custody.
Three internal spheres—wool, feathers, hay—are compressed beneath tensioned black fabric and gathered at a central knot, which functions as a seal rather than an expressive flourish. Each sphere conceals a gold-plated egg containing the artist’s hair. These eggs remain invisible, echoing Byzantine and Gothic practices in which relics derived authority from structured enclosure rather than display. The sacred is present but inaccessible.
The inward layering—organic matter surrounding metal, metal enclosing bodily trace—recalls pre-modern hierarchies of matter, where symbolic order and containment took precedence over empirical visibility. The tripartite arrangement condenses cosmological categories into adjacency, producing a material logic rather than narrative.
Triadic Reliquary enforces preservation over revelation, hierarchy over transparency. Its rigor lies in restraint: meaning emerges not through exposure, but through compression, concealment, and historical resonance.
