Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh is a showing an exhibition by Richard Forster, who is known for his meticulous pencil drawings, which have found homes in distinguished collections such as Tate London and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. He has described his technique as ‘photo-copy realism’, in which he manipulates his source material on a photocopier before beginning its painstaking transformation into a drawing. 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 he has focused on a triangulation between his own upbringing in the early 1980s on a Teesside housing estate in the northeast of England, the post-war American prototype suburb of Levittown, Pennsylvania 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 this most recent body of work, which sees him returning to sculpture as well as drawing.

Washing powder, radios, ceramics and archetypal East German figurines such as the Sandman and Cosmonaut take centre stage in this new sequence of sculptures, signalling Forster’s interest in an iconography of the vanishing brands and products of the former DDR. Cast in jesmonite, resin and aluminium and hand-painted, these facsimiles reference something of the 20th-century American commodity sculptures of Jeff Koons and Mike Kelley, while also connecting to 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.