Palaces and Prisons

Western Exhibitions is thrilled to present our fifth solo show with Marshall Brown, Palaces and Prisons, a two-part exhibition presenting collages from Brown’s new Palaces of Industry series in Gallery 1 and in Gallery 2, never-before-shown works that continue his ongoing Prisons of Invention series. Marshall Brown, an artist and architect, collapses reality and fiction with collage, a loophole between he shared territories of art and architecture. In these Palaces, he builds utopian visions from pure abstraction. In these Prisons, he constructs paradoxes from reality’s ruins. The show opens on Friday, March 27 with a public reception from 5 to 8pm, and will run through June 6, 2026. Gallery hours are Tuesday to Saturday, 11am to 6pm.

In Gallery 1, Palaces of Industry is a new series of large-scale collages on panel that returns to Brown’s earliest influences: the floating geometries and dynamic equilibrium of Suprematism, Constructivism’s photomontage tradition and layering, Giacometti’s surrealist structures, Duchamp’s readymades. He appropriates images from contemporary artists who make architecture their subject, reconstructing them as monumental collages. These are imagined futures inspired by great industrial palaces built at the birth of modernism: the Crystal Palace, factories that housed new collective labor, the production sites that promised transformation. White space floods the compositions. Fragments hover. The scale creates immersive worlds you can step inside—flatness expands into depth. Building utopian space from contemporary art’s fascination with architecture, Brown turns art’s gaze at architecture back on itself. These are not pictures. They are visions.

In Gallery 2, these never-before-shown works continue his ongoing collage-on-paper Prisons of Invention series, named for Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s Carceri d’invenzione. Brown constructs these paradoxical, labyrinthine spaces from fragments of recent architectural photography, just as Piranesi built his imaginary dungeons from the ruins of Rome. Multiple viewpoints collide and diverge within a single composition. Light and shadow emerge from hidden sources. Fragments layer and overlap, creating perspectives that can’t belong to the same space. These are visions of many moments struggling to coexist—each piece holds multiple experiences that refuse to settle into one.