As this year’s Frieze Art Fair is set to kick off, one unlikely location will play host to a new site-specific exhibition from Brit-artist Toby Ziegler. From 10th – 20th October, the basement of Old Burlington Street’s Q Park car park will be the atmospheric backdrop for a series of sculptures and large-scale light boxes (the space’s only source of light), inspired by Pieter Bruegel’s The Cripples (1568).

Deep down below street level – fourteen floors, to be precise – Ziegler revisits his common themes, reappropriating Renaissance masters – referencing the degradation of images through repetitive reproductions. Sourcing low-resolution images from the internet, and reworking them through 3D modelling, then sculpture – Ziegler’s works offer a distorted vision of reality; ominous, deformed figures that bewitch as much as they unsettle.

As Toby prepares to unveil this fabulously sinister work, we caught up with him for a quick chat…

Bruegel’s curious work, The Cripples – upon which this work is based – is thought to be an indictment on a cruel society. Are you pointing the finger at anything in modern culture with this installation?

I think it’s inevitable that the work I make ends up reflecting aspects of society today. The sculptures in this show refer quite specifically to Bruegel’s Cripples but I can also see the legacy of other historical works that have had an influence on me over the years: fragments of classical sculpture, the Laocoon group at the Vatican, Courbet’s Origine du Monde, Rodin’s Balzac, Francis Bacon’s Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, Sol Lewitt’s open cubes.

However the works also refer to war porn from Iran and Afghanistan that I stumbled across on the internet, through reading about online censorship and nowthatsfuckedup.com. The work explicitly refers to digital technology and couldn’t have been made without the use of 3D modelling software. I’m interested in the way computers effect memory and our sense of physicality.

The geometric frames that the figures are suspended from/lean on function like crutches and I suppose I am concerned with physical and psychological prostheses.

Is there a relation between the light boxes – with work appropriated from a Piero della Francesca fresco – and the Bruegel-inspired sculptures? 

Absolutely. They were conceived together. The light boxes are the only light sources in the space and illuminate the sculptures. They function a little like windows, although the vista they offer is an impenetrable thicket of horses’ legs. I think you can connect Piero Della Francesca’s compositions to modernism and abstraction. The sections of the fresco I have used reminded me of Guernica.

A subterranean car park sure is an interesting space for art, were you seeking out a venue like this, or did the opportunity present itself?

I wanted this project to happen in an underground space. I spent a lot of time on Subterranea Britannica which is an encyclopedia of bunkers, tunnels and caverns; but decided that I wanted the space that was still in use, and was more mundane. I embarked on a tour of London’s underground car-parks and probably visited 50 car-parks last year.

We’re publishing this work online, where inevitably the images will be copied, shared, republished, pasted onto Tumblr blogs and social networks… with your own work inspired by the reproduction and degradation of Renaissance masters; how do you feel about the modern version of this? In a way, it’s almost a continuation of your own processes…

I’m glad if the work is reproduced and recontextualised. The equation isn’t really balanced until people see it, and the internet allows so many more people access. However the crux of the works is the relationship between digital and material, and a lot is lost if you can’t move around them and experience them physically, as things.