Toby Ziegler

Toby Ziegler was born in 1972 in London, where he continues to live and work. He studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London, earning a BA (Hons) between 1991 and 1994.

His practice uses computer-aided 3D modelling to appropriate and distort historical paintings, translating the results into faceted metal and plaster sculptures and into paintings that read as abstracted, glitched versions of their sources. The work treats digital manipulation as a way of thinking about history, image transmission, and loss.

Ziegler's exhibition history moves through European and international institutions and galleries: a solo show at Chisenhale Gallery, London in 2005; Yorkshire Sculpture Park's Longside Gallery in 2007; The Alienation of Objects at the Zabludowicz Collection, London in 2010; a solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, Helsinki in 2012; a survey at The Hepworth Wakefield and a solo show at Galerie Max Hetzler, Paris, both in 2014; Your Shadow Rising at the Museum of Old and New Art (Mona) in Hobart, Tasmania, from 2018 to 2019; Broken Images at PKM Gallery, Seoul, in 2023; and Escapism at Galerie Max Hetzler in 2025. He is currently represented by Galerie Max Hetzler and Simon Lee Gallery.

Ziegler's institutional exhibition record, spanning the Zabludowicz Collection, Kiasma, The Hepworth Wakefield, and Mona, points to sustained curatorial interest in his method of translating art history through digital distortion into sculpture and paint. Detailed critical commentary specific enough to quote directly was not located in the sources reviewed for this profile.

Ziegler's auction record stands at GBP 98,500 (about USD 157,009), achieved at Christie's London's Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale on 15 October 2014; Christie's press materials associate this lot with the painting The Grand Cause (2006) and cited the result as a new benchmark for the artist. A later Phillips London online sale in October 2020 brought GBP 37,800, well under that mark, and no subsequent public sale has been documented at a higher price. A 2025 sale of a work titled Designated for Leisure is noted by MutualArt as a recent annual record, but no price has been published for it, so the 2014 Christie's result remains the best-documented figure to date.

No catalogue raisonne has been identified for Ziegler's work; verification runs through his current galleries, Galerie Max Hetzler and Simon Lee Gallery, and the artist's studio. His auction history is limited in volume, with a single standout result from 2014 and no confirmed public sale above it since, so any comparison of prices should account for how few data points exist. His deeper track record is institutional rather than at auction, with holdings at Tate, the Arts Council Collection, and the Zabludowicz Collection, among other public collections, offering a stronger signal of standing than the thin secondary market on its own.