Richard Forster’s first solo London exhibition, as part of Jerwood Artists Platform’s collaboration with Cell Project Space, presents a significant body of new and recent work.
On entering the gallery visitors are confronted by Stack, a narrow vertical, piled form of brightly painted resin that totters to almost human height. Presented wall-mounted were selected works from his Love series. Mimicking A4 sheets of white paper that have been screwed up into a ball, then re-found and re-flattened, these resin casts reveal discrete triangular forms almost embossed into the crumpled surfaces. The triangles vary their position from one work to another, layering the potential narratives.
The synthetic, candy pinks of Stack are carried through to the other spaces. In the main gallery a vast arrangement of patterned and polished stainless steel discs float a few inches off the floor. Sitting on top of the discs are abstracted sculptures, reminiscent of stacked chairs, but more obliquely read as temporary homes for an intense string of scribbled lines fabricated in neon tubing. For the end gallery Richard Forster has created a new arrangement that combines wall and floor based work. The chair and neon undergo further abstraction, resulting in a simpler exploration of form and light that still acknowledges the role of the given gallery architecture, a common theme running throughout the artist’s work.
