EDINBURGH.- 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.

Washing powder, radios, ceramics and archetypal East German figurines such as the Sandman and Cosmonaut take centre stage in a captivating new sequence of sculptures, signalling Forster’s interest in an iconography of the vanishing brands and products of the former DDR - now symbolic of Ostalgie. Cast in jesmonite, resin and aluminium and then painstakingly hand-painted, these facsimiles reference something of the 20th century American commodity sculptures of Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, whilst also connecting to the real people in Germany who Forster met in searching for these objects on sites like eBay and Etsy. The packaging that they arrived in is similarly cast, painted and used as a plinth. It’s a project steeped in people, memory, and ideas of authenticity. Forster gives us an object so believably realistic that it becomes almost otherworldly, and yet somehow evidence of an entirely projected past.

Accompanying this new body of sculptures are two series of drawings, which also play with the idea of appearance and reality and the truth of images. The first are developed from Forster’s ongoing research into the sites and situations of the DDR, and particularly into the relationship between architecture and moments of social upheaval. His focus here is on the night of 9 November 1989 as the Wall fell and an incredulous and increasingly ecstatic crowd flowed like a river from Alexanderplatz to the Brandenburg Gate. There is a filmic quality to the freezing of this moment in history– presented as paired images, like film stills, double images in which the second recalls the first, calling to mind the veracity of their own hand-drawn character with the inevitable slippage of hand and eye between one and the other.

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.