Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Your Mother, an exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist Toby Ziegler. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery in Hong Kong.
A new body of work takes as its source two paintings by the seventeenth century French painter Georges de la Tour. Magdalene with the Smoking Flame, and The Flea Catcher, both painted between 1630 and 1640, offer mirrored compositions of a seated female figure in contemplative chiaroscuro. Working from this axis Ziegler develops an anatomical and figurative lexicon. The largest paintings of the group imagine the meeting of the two compositions, as if the sacred and the profane subjects were to meet in a single pictorial space. Other works re-frame each individual figure, or suggest intimate cropped details, just visible through a lattice of geometric pattern. For the first time, Ziegler’s painting practice arcs back to his sculptural work, a fragmentation and re-assembling of body parts in which medium and subject intertwine and coalesce.
