Toby Ziegler, The Alienation of Objects (2010)© Stephen White, courtesy Zabludowicz Collection, Simon Lee Gallery, London and Max Hetzler, Berlin
In a quest for verisimilitude, Johannes Vermeer, Canaletto and Sir Joshua Reynolds are all said to have used cameras of one sort of another. Now Toby Ziegler goes the other way by using imaging technology to distort his real world subject matter.
Photographs are the starting point for his current show at New Art Gallery Walsall. But these have been converted into 3D digital forms and then turned into handmade models using aluminium. His finished products retain the look of vector models.
These polygonal visions will be familiar to anyone who caught his work at last year's Newspeak 2 show at Saatchi Gallery. This featured labour intensive paintings by the Londoner in which scenic landscapes came to resemble provisional virtual worlds.
Now Ziegler has turned his mouse hand to art history as an Iberian stone head, Staffordshire pottery dogs, a classical Venus, plus neo-classical and Greek sculpture find their way into his show. Photos of these objects alread show the decompositional effects of time.
But while the artist uses software often used to project, restore and render things perfect, it appears to have the opposite effect here. His lightweight planar sculptures are lacking in visual information.
In a further remove from authenticity, this entire show is a transplant from the London project space of the Zabludowicz Collection. It was site specific. Now Ziegler's Objects really will be Alienated.
- Admission free. Open 10am-5pm Tuesday to Saturday.
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