Little boxes on the hillside Little boxes made of ticky-tacky Little boxes, little boxes, Little boxes all the same
What connects Levittown, immortalized in Pete Seeger’s song, with 1920’s erotica, ornamental figurines, youthful farm hands and modernist tower blocks? For Richard Forster has spent the last year working on a series of intricate drawings and sculptures that present as their subject this seemingly diverse group of images.
Levittown was the post-war suburb built on the potato farms of Long Island that became the blueprint for subsequent suburban communities and in a sense Forster’s drawing, made from an aerial photograph of Levittown in 1949 acts as a blueprint for this exhibition. Central, is a sculptural work in which an estate of High-rise social housing has been erected atop three school or office type tables and this piece is surrounded by a series of drawings of pastoral figures, farm children and nudes. This presentation of the nostalgic, the object of desire and social architecture recalls Robert Smithson’s analysis of the architectural unconscious and Forster’s new work certainly seems to find some grounding in Smithson’s view that the primary function of modernist architecture was to repress the other with the weight of ideologies and idealisations. But if you consider that one of Forster’s first drawings of a high-rise was an attempt to make a self-portrait as a building, you soon realise that this work is far from an illustration of social history. In painstakingly recreating these images in pencil on paper and juxtaposing it with the utopian architectural model like high-rise sculpture, Forster achieves the almost impossible alchemy of mediums that he has been aiming for over the last few years. Through the process of drawing he transforms photography into the object of desire and once he has your gaze he reflects it back out with the sculptural work.
In 2006 Richard Forster was awarded a Jerwood Artists’ Platform with a solo exhibition at Cell Project Space, London and since this time there has been a huge amount of interest in his work. MOT INTERNATIONAL will be presenting a solo exhibition of Forster’s work at Open Space, Art Cologne, April 15-20 2008. He has had recent exhibitions at Spike Island, Bristol in 2007 and Ingleby Edinburgh with Richard Artschwager and recent group shows include, Opposite of Vertigo, Drawing Room, London, New Art on View, New Art Gallery Walsall, Daisychain, MOT, Blue Star Red Wedge, Glasgow International, Lounge II, MIMA and The (Ideal) Home Show, Gimpel Fils Gallery, London. His work is in over twenty prominent collections, both public and private, including UBS, the Government Art Collection, Rhode Island School of Design and the New Art Gallery, Walsall.
MOTINTERNATIONAL presents Richard Forster
Stand 31 Open Space Art Cologne Koelnmesse GmbH Messeplatz 1 50679 Köln
16 - 20 April 2008 Vernissage & Professional Preview 15 April
Please join us to view Richard Forster's new work which includes an installation of a new sculptural work and 7 new drawings. For more details and images please contact the gallery.
