‘[Ziegler’s recent works are] a contemplation on mortality, of sorts. Not necessarily mortality in its clearest form – the death of the body – but in the everyday, perennial mortality of things, thoughts and connections, that are so clearly the fabric of life, as much as order, bonds and sense.
Ziegler approaches this existential crisis by exploring what it means for something to be abstract, and to be abstracted, as a way to understand, in a much broader sense, what we are often, subconsciously, afraid of. His small oil paintings are beautiful in their new, slightly distorted forms; a bouquet of red flowers seems to flow from its dark background, its beauty spilling out sublimely in this digital chaos. His “ghost files” emerge like organised galaxies of stars, webs of DNA: whatever they once were, they are mesmerising now, in this new form. If Ziegler’s art teaches us anything, it is that the new, chaotic, broken present is still beautiful, even as it changes and evolves and threatens to disappear – or perhaps especially because of that fleeting status.’
C. Spens, ‘Toby Ziegler: The sudden longing to collapse 30 years of distance’, Studio International, 21 September 2020
'The titles are not meant to pin down meaning in the work, but they all relate to memory, artifice, and the idea of remembering as a creative act. Paintings can be vessels full of ghosts: personal and collective phantoms, as well as those of the viewer; all the ghosts that creep in from the internet; the ghosts of paintings that came before, medieval, modernist and the ones I've made. There are conventions that lie dormant in paintings, and by dismantling the act and then putting it back together, perhaps it’s possible to invoke some bastard form to materialise in the gaps between things.'
T. Ziegler, 2022
‘I’m interested in the way we form memories. I remember hearing a neurologist say that each time we remember an event, we’re actually remembering the last time we remembered it, with added layers of distortion each time. Therefore our most cherished memories might be furthest from true events.’
T. Ziegler, ‘Interview: Toby Ziegler on Expanding Painting & the Subjectivity of Algorithms’, Something Curated, 9 September 2020
Slave, 2017 consists of an anonymous figure maintaining a contrapposto stance, which regroups references to Henri Matisse’s sculpture Madeleine, 1901 and Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, 1516. Departing from a digitally modelled prototype, Ziegler produced a clay model by hand which mimicked the aesthetic of a 3D printed artefact. The form was then scanned, digitally enlarged and 3D printed, before a further mould was taken from the print and used as a cast for the work. The sensuous grey curves of the final sculpture bear various imperfections, highlighting a mismatch between the physical and digital worlds: the coiled clay forms are marked, deformed and sometimes ruptured, engendering what the artist refers to as ‘baroque flourishes’.
‘As part of the picture the aluminium plays a role in the composition of the picture. But the disturbance of the surface causes us to move around the picture. As we move the picture does not obey the laws of what is in the picture plane. We walk around it as an object, not as a picture. As an object, not a representation of one, the aluminium now functions as a way of circumventing the picture plane. We are used to objects that have been stuck on the canvas since Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. These objects introduced a new condition of light. In Ziegler’s paintings the aluminium is both inside and outside pictorial space. It is both lux and lumen, both the source of light and the distribution of light.’
P. Adams, ‘Making Light Shine’, in Toby Ziegler, exh. cat., Hong Kong: Simon Lee Gallery, 2014, p. 26
‘In Toby Ziegler’s landscape paintings there are no trees, no mountains, no sunsets, no cottages, no figures. We do not see ‘the light that has settled on things’. Yet we have some sort of experience when looking at the paintings, of landscapes and the objects they once held. This is not surprising because we have seen these landscapes before. Ziegler has chosen a group of Gainsborough canvases. From each he has conjured up three pictures painted not on canvas but on aluminium. […] The aluminium is a central issue for it works as the hinge between the painting, pictorial space and what is external to the painting, what is extruded from the picture, what is a condition of the picture. The highly reflective aluminium surface changes constantly and can yield spectacular effects. It appears now brilliant white, now a blinding silver – gleaming shards of light. Viewed from certain positions this light smashes the picture into pieces. The aluminium base as a material bursts through the picture, through pictorial space. The scrambled surface had gently shifted one’s gaze but now the body is discomfited and seeks both to escape and to investigate the picture. The paintings create a ‘little business’ not only for the eye but also for the body which it puts in motion. Behind the beauty of Toby’s paintings is the violence of forms of light.’
P. Adams, ‘Making Light Shine’, in Toby Ziegler: anticlimax, exh. cat., London/Hong Kong: Simon Lee Gallery, 2014, pp. 23-24
‘The aluminium is a central issue for it works as the hinge between the painting, pictorial space and what is external to the painting, what is extruded from the picture, what is a condition of the picture. The highly reflective aluminium surface changes constantly and can yield spectacular effects. It appears now brilliant white, now a blinding silver – gleaming shards of light. Viewed from certain positions this light smashes the picture into pieces. The aluminium base as a material bursts through the picture, through pictorial space. The scumbled surface has gently shifted one’s gaze but now the body is discomfited and seeks both to escape and to investigate the picture. The paintings create a “little business” not only for the eye but also for the body which it puts in motion. Behind the beauty of Toby Ziegler’s paintings is the violence of forms of light.’
P. Adams, ‘Making Light Shine’, in Toby Ziegler, exh. cat., Hong Kong: Simon Lee Gallery, 2014, pp. 25–26
‘With intentionality considered the painting begins to crackle with anxiety. This process of spraying oil paint becomes the terminal gesture, the final stage of painting and the erasure of the previous work. The combination of opticality with a performed act of cancellation becomes a dual estrangement, creating both a distancing effect and a distancing affect.’
E. Donnelly, ‘On Anxiety and Eyesight’, in Toby Ziegler: From the Assumption of the Virgin to Window/Orphan Control, London: Koenig Books / Simon Lee Gallery, 2012, pp. 25–31
‘In the past, Ziegler has used a timber structure and facets of oxidised aluminium. For most of the sculptures here [Borderline Something], he uses a material called concrete canvas, whose behaviour is quite distinct from that of metal; it is supple and light during the process of manipulation but once set in place and exposed to water, it begins to harden and ultimately becomes completely rigid. The sculptures are therefore inhabited by a new kind of animation, since the petrified fabric never remains as perfectly flat and rectilinear as aluminium facets. The surfaces and ridges vibrate in a way utterly discontinuous with Ziegler’s previous experiments, becoming more congruent with the paintings in their voluntary imperfection.’
J-M. Gallais, ‘Toby Ziegler, Silent Lives: Notes on the exhibition Borderline Something’, in Toby Ziegler: Borderline Something, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2013, n.p.
‘Like many contemporary artists who rely on existing images, Ziegler is as fascinated by the original painting as by the circulation and transformation undergone through its reproduction. Put ‘Hans Memling flowers’ into Google Images and the Madrid painting inhabits the first fifteen results, not one of them identical with any other in framing, format, colour or texture. But for Ziegler, unlike for many of his peers, this technical consideration is less important than it might at first seem. Certainly it is less important than the choice of image fragment and its subsequent digital and manual treatment. As a process, the enlargement of pixelated, discoloured images seems almost automatic in Ziegler – as if no new voice could be imparted to an image before it had passed through a singular neutralising filter. A grey palette with pastel green, off-blue or pink overtones predominates in his oeuvre.’
J-M. Gallais, ‘Toby Ziegler, Silent Lives: Notes on the exhibition Borderline Something’, in Toby Ziegler: Borderline Something, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2013, n.p.
‘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.’
J-M. Gallais, ‘Toby Ziegler, Silent Lives: Notes on the exhibition Borderline Something’, in Toby Ziegler: Borderline Something, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2013, n.p.
‘Sometimes you work with an image, and it feels like it succeeded on some level or sometimes it feels like it didn’t, but either way it feels finished. Whereas some images just feel like they’re never exhausted and you keep coming back to them over and over. That’s why you can find some recurring motifs in the work. Like the foot, which was also in the previous exhibition [Borderline Something]. There is actually a postcard on the Study for the Feet of an Apostle by Albrecht Dürer in my parents’ house. I always thought feet were one of the most interesting parts of the body. There’s this great essay by Georges Bataille, ‘The Big Toe’, about the idea that there’s a strange hierarchy in the human body, because we consider the foot to be literally base, because it’s closest to the ground and it’s in the mud so as a result there’s a kind of taboo around feet and they’re wrongly considered ugly. And there’s also something interesting in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, when he writes about the fact that it’s impossible to perceive your own body as an object, because your body is also the means of perception, but you can almost objectify your feet, because they’re further away from your eyes.’
T. Ziegler in conversation with Jean-Marie Gallais, in Remember Everything: 40 Years Galerie Max Hetzler, exh. cat., Berlin/London: Galerie Max Hetzler/Holzwarth Publications/Ridinghouse, 2014, pp. 244-245
‘“I didn't want the sculptures to be that figurative,” Ziegler says. “I wanted them to be quite lumpy and ambiguous.” Art history is for him a pool of images to tap into, a springboard he says – never an end in itself.“It's dangerous talking about their origin sometimes,” he says, as if to warn me.
‘People get stuck with that, they think that’s a key or an explanation, which it really isn’t. I want people to have an experience with a thing, and hopefully it has all sorts of resonance, some of which is there because of the “mother object”, some of which is there because of the way I’ve dealt with it, and a lot of it probably has to do with whatever experiences they’ve had.”’
C. Milliard, ‘Underground Man Toby Ziegler Takes Over the Park’, in Blouin Modern Painters, October 2012
‘A painting is an analogue for the retina, but it is also a compound of histories, of moods, of feelings, of actions. Toby Ziegler’s paintings vacillate between the retina and the brain, not switching between these poles, but rather interpolating each pole with the other, constituting each other evenly. Diffused spots of sprayed paint float on the surface, like correlatives for scotomas. These resonate too close to the eye, behind the eye, arresting seeing on its threshold. They vaguely conform to a grid, in places interrupted by a masked line, hinting at a geometrical order. Their effect is nullifying and narcotic; they hover formlessly, feeling too close to interpret. Behind these there is an image, prior not only in the sense that it comes from an earlier stage in the painting, but also in that it is a reconstitution from the history of painting, now withdrawn from its context, inverted, desaturated and alien. This image details fissures, cracks – the accidents of a painting’s surface that accrue over time and create a membrane that denies the allure of illusionistic depth. In relation to these rendered points of degeneration, the sprayed spots come to signify corruption, but this is corruption that has been enacted, the images intentionally destabilised.’
E. Donnelly, ‘On Anxiety and Eyesight’, in Toby Ziegler – From the Assumption of the Virgin to Widow/Orphan Control, London: Koenig Books/Simon Lee Gallery, 2012, p. 25
’To date, Ziegler’s sculpture has perhaps had the starring role. The same feeling in relation to objects – the same analysis of things – governs it. The artist models fragments or ensembles in space, frequently starting from two-dimensional sources and here we find still life again.’
J.M. Gallais, Toby Ziegler: Boderline Something, exh. cat., Berlin: Galerie Max Hetzler, 2013, n.p.
’Since 2006, Ziegler has been incorporating clouds into his landscape pictures, and since 2007, he has been doing so with the aid of this collage technique which combines two pictorial systems: a calculated, geometric system and an organic one – the elusiveness or organic cloud formations making them hard to capture precisely within geometric parameters. Interestingly, Ziegler’s new pictures bring him into contact with a pictorial tradition which already knew how to combine rigorous geometry, perspective and organic forms: the wooden inlays of the Renaissance.’
H.W. Holzwarth, ‘Toby Ziegler’, in Art Now Vol 3, Cologne: Taschen, 2008, p. 536
All works: © Toby Ziegler
Image Courtesies:
Victorian Water Mains (4th version), Blind Mouth, Metaplasmus, and Our Carnivorous Ancestors: Courtesy of the artist and Simon Lee Gallery London/Hong Kong