Resurrecting The American Dream In Pencil

‘The horror of town planning made into an eerily graceful abstraction’:
Richard Forster’s Levittown Variation - Ostalgie Pattern, 2015 (detail).

Levittown is a community of 20,000 houses built by William Levitt and Co on Long Island for veterans returning to a housing shortage at the end of WW2. The builders became so skilled they could put one up in under 17 minutes. Each house was tiny, identical and came with a built-in tv and hi- fi. Levittown was the original mass-produced American suburbia.

Levittown Rancher Floor Plan, 2015, 5.32 pm 2015, pencil and acrylic medium on bristolboard
[Private collection, New York]

British artist Richard Forster draws from photographs rather than from life – either using his own snapshots, or images found in magazines, books, or on the internet. This exhibition of sculpture and drawings on paper is based on Forster’s 18 month study of Levittown. The exhibition questions how an architectural environment impacts on developing culture and sense of memory.
At the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex until 5 June
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