Brian Thoreen’s paper sculpture masterpiece called “Paragraphic in Four Stacks” is a set of four chairs made from stacks of manila paper. It’s part of an exhibition at Masa Gallery in Mexico City art week that explores sustainable furniture production using paper or cardboard as structural material.
The sculpture was a painstaking and meticulous process that took ten people working tirelessly for a month to complete. The chairs are made of 3,000 stacked sheets of manila paper glued together one by one on the seat alone. This way, allowing the edges to curl or tilt up naturally from the natural tension created from the gluing process and organically form the back of the chairs.
Thoreen has previously worked on other components like metal, wood, rubber, and marble and manipulated them in their raw forms into sharply geometrical pieces of furniture or lamps. But “Paragraphic in Four Stacks” is his “first exploration into using manila paper at furniture scale.”
He told Dezeen, “Using industrial paper has a strong history in art, but is mostly known for use in file folders and envelopes that hold and store information and tie our world together like books.” The chairs appear as work of art with their organically wrinkled features. It is unclear though if they are strong enough to be seated on.
“Paragraphic in Four Stacks” is Thoreen’s latest masterpiece and is one of many other structures on display at Masa Gallery, which he co-founded with Héctor Esrawe and Age Salajõe in 2022. The exhibition is also the first collaborative show between Masa Gallery and Luhring Augustine, a renowned New York gallery.
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Images courtesy of Masa Gallery
