Anders Bergstrom: Work.

Planthouse is pleased to present WORK., an exhibition of new works on paper by Anders Bergstrom, made in collaboration with Dieu Donné, alongside a selection of Bergstrom’s earlier prints.

For more than a decade, Bergstrom has used the brown paper bag as both subject and material provocation. An object of everyday utility—cheap, ubiquitous, and disposable—, in his work, it becomes a subject of close examination. . His painstaking prints reproduce the creases, folds, seams, stains, labels, and other incidental marks of the bag, bringing the highly considered language of printmaking to an object that is ordinarily overlooked. The resulting tension between the ordinary and the precious, the functional and the aesthetic, is central to Bergstrom’s practice.

These new works grew out of an invitation from Dieu Donné—the legendary New York center for collaborative hand papermaking—for Bergstrom to work directly with its master papermakers. Through this exchange, he has extended his longstanding investigation of the brown paper bag into the realm of fine art papermaking. Every work is unique, while sharing a consistent handmade process developed in collaboration with Dieu Donné: pigmented cotton and unbleached abaca are formed into sheets and worked with linen pulp paint and watermarking. The process allows Bergstrom to retain the recognizable structure and vocabulary of the paper bag while making the physical character of paper itself an active part of the piece.

Each sheet bears the evidence of its making. Variations in the pulp, pigment, surface, and watermark distinguish one work from another, resulting in individual objects rather than repeated impressions. The familiar image of the brown paper bag is thus translated from some- thing mass-produced and disposable into something singular and materially considered.

The collaboration also foregrounds a fundamental concern of Bergstrom’s practice: the relationship between image and labor. The familiar appearance of the paper bag belies the time, skill, and accumulation of decisions required to reconstruct it. Working alongside Dieu Donné’s master papermakers, Bergstrom brings this relationship directly into the process of making, transforming an everyday ob- ject through the labor-intensive traditions of handmade paper.

Presented alongside selected earlier prints, the new works create a dialogue across Bergstrom’s evolving engagement with the bag. The exhibition moves between representation and material, edition and unique object, mechanical reproduction and hand labor. Across the works, an ordinary object is made strange and unfamiliar through sustained attention.