Alex Hay
Paper Bag
1968
Not on view
Date
1968
Classification
Sculpture
Medium
Fiberglass, epoxy, paint and paper
Dimensions
Overall: 59 1/4 × 29 1/4 × 17 3/4in. (150.5 × 74.3 × 45.1 cm)
Accession number
69.9
Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Rights and reproductions
© artist or artist’s estate
During the 1960s, Alex Hay made deadpan, over-scaled copies of disposable objects like a cash register slip, a page from a yellow legal note pad, toilet paper, and a paper airplane. Standing at nearly 5 feet, Paper Bag is an enlarged rendering of its diminutive source. Hay coated the sculpture’s paper skeleton with fiberglass, epoxy, resin, and paint to achieve a rigid surface and thoroughly realistic appearance, which features wrinkles, tears, saw-tooth edges, and a brand insignia. In Paper Bag, as in all of Hay’s large-scale sculptures of everyday items, the artist’s labor-intensive process stands in deliberate contrast to the ubiquity and unimportance of the throwaway objects he depicts so precisely.
