Richard Forster | OST..!

Richard Forster (b. 1970) is known for his meticulous pencil drawings, examples of which are in distinguished collections worldwide including TATE London and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has described his technique as ‘photo-copy realism’ – manipulating his source material on a photocopier before beginning its painstaking transformation into a drawing. For all his extraordinary facility as a draughtsman, Forster’s work is never just about image making for its own sake, there is always a process of deep research and a conceptual purpose behind his choice of subject. In recent years this has focused on a personal triangulation between his own upbringing in the early 80s on a Teesside housing estate in the Northeast of England, the post-war American prototype suburb Levittown and the phenomenon of Ostalgie, a nostalgia for life in Communist East Germany following the collapse of the German Democratic Republic in 1989. This last subject comes to the fore in OST..!, shown for the first time here at Ingleby, which sees him returning to work in sculpture as well as drawing, an extraordinary new body of work that extends his interest in the validity of images into three dimensions with a mind boggling group of 'facsimile sculptures' and into colour with a series of paintings in graphite and gouache.

The second group take as their starting point, an internet search commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall on the 9th of November 2019. Googling 'die sandmannchen DDR' Forster came accross twelve stills from the popular East German children’s stop-motion animation Unser Sandmannchen as its starting point. Transformed into twelve works on paper, these stills are paired with trompe l’œil masking tape, obsolete East German brand logos and scrawled children’s chalk drawings.

Exploring, as he puts it “a dialectic around place”, OST..! is a continuation of the curious connection that Forster has formed over the past 20 years between his childhood spent in the industrial community of Teesside in Thatcherite Britain, the rise and fall of the socialist experiment in East Germany and post-war American Suburbia. It is his most intense engagement with the shifting idea of place and otherness to date.

The artist wishes to acknowledge his thanks to The Shifting Foundation whose support enabled the research and production of these sculptures.