Toby Ziegler

“Ziegler paints on aluminium, a surface that endows oil paint with qualities of transparency and luminosity. Moreover, the metal ensures a very specific form of paint adhesion and drying; it retains the trace of every brushstroke, whose nuances stand out at each transition. This requires a particular technique: little touches laid on side-by-side resemble now enlarged pixels, now the very brushstrokes by which they were made. Here is Ziegler’s central gambit. The image is liquid and unstable; the viewer must move around it to eliminate reflections. One cannot even be sure that the painting is completely dry.
Yet these operations would mean nothing without a further process, one that comes into effect after the first layer of paint has been painstakingly laid down. Of course, it is thought through from the start with the aid of a computer used to elaborate the composition. This second stage can be perceived as a kind of sabotage – though without it the painting would not be complete. Ziegler now sprays the painting, authoritatively superimposing a pattern over the motif.”
Thus writes J-M. Gallais, in the essay ‘Toby Ziegler, Silent Lives: Notes on the exhibition Borderline Something’, in Toby Ziegler: Borderline Something, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2013, n.p.

Toby Ziegler (b. 1972, London) is a contemporary British artist working with painting and sculptures. Ziegler’s visual universe is Google, from which he sources the classic imagery, often historical paintings, he then digitally manipulates. He has been particularly inspired by, for example, photographs of the Freud family, Spanish still-life paintings, Dutch Old Masters and Nineteenth Century landscape paintings. With his computer Ziegler begins by processing the picture in various ways, eventually transferring the design onto an oxidised aluminium surface, to which he applies oil paint that he then brushes to achieve his desired effect.

The artwork in the auction, "Carnival in Lent" from 2016, references by its title Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting "The Fight Between Carnival and Lent" from 1559, and by its imagery Georges de la Tours’ "The Flea Catcher", from around 1630-1640. The piece is typical and highly representative of Ziegler’s artistic practice and the way in which he treats historical images.

Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art in Peekskill, NY, the Tate Gallery in London, the Francois Pinault Collection in Paris, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, Stavanger Kunstmuseum in Norway, among others. Ziegler has been wideley exhibitied around the world.