Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a solo show of British artist Toby Ziegler at this year’s Armory Show.
Toby Ziegler’s new works orchestrate a continual oscillation between abstraction and figuration and between art historical sources and their digital manipulation and obfuscation. This process begins with the appropriation of images which, through endless reproduction, have passed into the visual subconscious. Pieter Brueghel’s The Hunters in the Snow (1565) is re-scaled and repainted, its colours polarised and reversed in a technique which suggests the retinal trace of staring at the original for too long, with too great an intensity, and then looking at a white wall. Over the surface of the canvas Ziegler then paints a grid which carries the eye over its entire surface, and denies the very principles of perspective which structured the renaissance gaze. Another work reproduces the architectural rigour of a renaissance garden. Again, an
all-over digitised pattern frustrates the classical arrangement and its attempts to order nature and landscape.
Alongside these works Ziegler will show a sculpture based on the Venus of Hohle Fels. In a parallel to his painting technique, the artist works from found images of the object, often sourced as low resolution internet files. The imprecision of the digital image further abstracts the original, already made formless by the ravages of time. He then translates the object through digital rendering into an approximation of geometric planes. Constructed of aluminium skins, the ‘informe’ of the primitive Venus sinks, like an obese patient, into the table that supports her.
Toby Ziegler, born in 1972, studied at Central St Martin’s College of Art and Design. Recent Exhibitions include: The Alienation of Objects, 176, Zabludowicz Collection, London (2010); The Future Demands Your Participation: Contemporary Art from the British Council Collection, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai (2010); Hamsterwheel, initiated by Franz West, Malmö Konsthall, Sweden (2008); Recent Abstraction, British Art Display, Tate Britain, London (2007); build architecture, Camden Arts Centre, London (2006); Archipeinture: artists build architecture, Le Plateau, Paris (2006) and The Future Lasts a Long Time, Le Consortium, Dijon (2005). His work is included in major public and private collections internationally. He lives and works in London.
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