Gorenstein cohomology in abelian categories

We investigate relative cohomology functors on subcategories of abelian categories via Auslander-Buchweitz approximations and the resulting strict resolutions. We verify that certain comparison maps between these functors are isomorphisms and introduce a notion of perfection for this context. Our main theorem is a balance result for relative cohomology that simultaneously recovers theorems of Holm and the current authors as special cases.