Exhibitions

The work behind the exhibition history

Max Zorn: career & museum projects

A street lamp was the first light source for Max Zorn’s tape art. The materials remain simple: packing tape, acrylic glass and a scalpel. What has changed is the scale of the pictures and the places in which people encounter them—from a portrait discovered on an Amsterdam street to a museum exhibition, a festival installation or a new collection at an international art fair.

Across these settings, the pictures return to people and the worlds around them: a late-night bar, a train platform, an unfamiliar city, a moment between two people. Zorn draws on cinema, literature, old photographs and his own observations, combining references into scenes that leave room for the viewer’s imagination.

2011 · Amsterdam after dark

Zorn began placing small tape artworks on Amsterdam’s street lamps in 2011. Layers of translucent brown tape supplied the different tones; the existing city light made the image visible after dark. The installations could be encountered by anyone passing through the street.

A short making-of video, released that November, showed both parts of the process: cutting a picture from tape and taking it out into the city. It brought the work to an international audience. Early reports in La Vanguardia, HuffPost and La Repubblica introduced the technique to readers well beyond Amsterdam.

Read: La Vanguardia, December 2011 · HuffPost, January 2012

2012 · Hong Kong, Paris & Stick Together

Hong Kong International Art Fair, with the Sovereign Art Foundation, was an early opportunity to show the work and create it live outside Europe. The year also brought a solo exhibition in Paris with Gallery Visionairs, the Crest Hardware Show in New York, a street-art fair in Toronto, and exhibitions in Dortmund and Amsterdam. A presentation with the Princess Karina Foundation in Switzerland placed the work in a charitable setting.

In April, Deutsche Welle’s Euromaxx filmed Zorn at work and on Amsterdam’s streets. The interview explored the relationship between his method and his subjects: the tape’s warm tones, the city after dark, and characters drawn from literature and imagination.

The same year, his appearance at TED@Amsterdam introduced the idea of the city as a gallery. Through Stick Together, developed with Audrey Sykes, small handmade tape artworks were sent to people who wanted to install them in their own cities. A picture made in Amsterdam could become something a stranger discovered on a street elsewhere. Alongside this public project, Stick Together developed the gallery platform through which Zorn’s work would travel to exhibitions and art fairs.

Read and watch: Deutsche Welle: Tape Art · TED’s account of TED@Amsterdam

2013 · A festival, a book fair & the first Miami show

In April, Zorn and Sykes hosted the two-day Stick Together festival at Amsterdam Roest. Street artists gathered for live painting, murals and installations. Zorn made a nine-square-metre tape artwork, extending a method that had begun with small street-lamp pieces to an architectural scale.

His exhibition programme included Urban & Icon in London, Art Monaco, RAW Art Fair in Rotterdam and Art Stage Singapore, as well as Amsterdam’s Kosmopolite Art Tour and Larger Than Life at Canvas op de 7e. At the Frankfurt Book Fair on 10 October, he created work live with publisher Korsch, which released the Tape Art 2014 calendar.

Miami became a recurring part of the exhibition calendar. Widewalls reported that Zorn’s first Miami solo presentation, in a Wynwood bar opposite the Wynwood Walls in 2013, sold out within four days. Presentations at SCOPE Miami Beach followed, taking the work from that informal beginning into the international fair programme.

Read: Woolff Gallery biography · Korsch’s Frankfurt Book Fair announcement · Widewalls interview

2013–2014 · Children of the War

For Amsterdam Light Festival, Zorn created Children of the War at the Dutch Resistance Museum, or Verzetsmuseum. Four illuminated tape portraits above the entrance depicted Eva, Jan, Nelly and Henk, whose childhood experiences during the Second World War are told in Verzetsmuseum Junior. A fifth portrait, of an Amsterdam resistance fighter, was displayed in the auditorium.

On view from 6 December 2013 to 19 January 2014, the installation connected the material’s resemblance to old photographs with specific lives and memories. The festival route brought these stories into the nighttime city, while the museum provided their historical context.

Sources: Amsterdam Light Festival artwork archive · Verzetsmuseum annual report 2013, p. 23 · 2014, p. 7

2014 · SXSW, Bangkok & Amsterdam Museum

At South by Southwest in Austin, Zorn presented Huckleberry in the SXSW Eco Light Garden. The large illuminated work carried his tape technique into a public festival setting. Live creation at the 3M Idea Exchange Lounge gave visitors another way to encounter the process, watching individual layers become a picture.

In Bangkok, the Living Arts Festival brought his work to Gaysorn Plaza. The Bangkok Post interview explored how Zorn builds stories as well as images. One example was Tango, inspired by the wordless exchange he had observed at an Argentine tango event. The year also included STROKE and ARTMUC in Munich, BLOOOM in Cologne, Kunst sta(d)tt Leerraum in Dinslaken, a group show with the COLLECTIVE in London, and (Un-)Fair in New York.

On 1 November, the Amsterdam Museum presented My Time, My Town during Museumnacht. Made for Amsterdam DNA: Street Art, the large tape artwork was installed in the museum courtyard as part of a group exhibition responding to the city. Zorn also presented his work at Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam that year.

His work entered public auction records that year. Tajan’s Paris urban-art sale on 9 October included Exposed and Bangkok Night Flight. In December, he returned to Miami for SCOPE Miami Beach, continuing the relationship with the city’s art week.

Sources: SXSW: Huckleberry · Bangkok Post: All Taped Up · Amsterdam Museum project record · Tajan’s auction record

2015 · Colour, solo exhibitions & Cornell Art Museum

RED at Amsterdam’s Original Dampkring Gallery and Tales of Another Time at MUCA Gallery in Munich gave Zorn space to develop colour and narrative across a larger group of pictures. The Munich exhibition, extended into April, brought together scenes whose characters seem caught between one event and the next. Coloured tape introduced new accents into the familiar brown palette. Artsy and Süddeutsche Zeitung examined the pictures, their construction and their references to cinema and literature.

In London, his artist residency at the Sanderson Hotel was covered by BBC News. Further exhibitions included Vault17 in Amsterdam, Tape It! at Heyne Kunst Fabrik in Offenbach, Tour de Britain in London, and fairs in Berlin, Cologne and Hong Kong. In Rio de Janeiro, he participated in Whatsappropriation: the art of revisiting art, the sixth 3M Digital Art Show at Fundição Progresso.

At the Cornell Art Museum in Delray Beach, Florida, Zorn took part in Reimagined, from 14 July to 18 October. The group exhibition brought together 16 artists working with unexpected materials. Zorn’s tape art joined works that transformed everyday materials into sculpture, portraits and installations.

CNN filmed Zorn at the Affordable Art Fair in Hong Kong, explaining both the physical process and the international participation in Stick Together. At Spectrum Miami later that year, Max Zorn received the Artist of the Year award and Stick Together Gallery received Best New Exhibitor of the Year.

Read: Artsy’s feature on the work · BBC: Sanderson residency · Boca Raton magazine on Reimagined · Exhibition history · Spectrum presentation and awards

2016 · Dubai, Singapore, London & live creation

The 2016 programme moved between public festivals and indoor exhibitions: Dubai Canvas, the Affordable Art Fair in Singapore, Grenoble Street Art Fest, Dinslaken’s Kunst statt Leerraum, and the Munich project Dein Viertel. Deine Leinwand. with MUCA and Red Bull. Other appearances included the International Art Fair Zurich, Art and Architecture Vol. 1 at the Mies van der Rohe Business Park in Krefeld, and the Tape Art Convention at Berlin’s Neurotitan Gallery.

BBC News met Zorn in Singapore. He described a way of composing that allows different cities and eras to occupy the same picture, rather than illustrating a single place or reproducing a film still. In his Art Republik interview, he spoke about Americana, literature, remembered images and the appeal of a story left open. These interests explain why the work can feel familiar without describing a scene the viewer has actually seen before.

At Moniker Art Fair in London, Financial Times critic Rachel Spence watched Zorn creating an image at the Stick Together booth. Her review described the finished pictures’ “Hollywood-noir glamour”. The year ended with a solo presentation at Aqua Art Miami, continuing his Miami Art Week exhibitions.

The public process also became the subject of Zorn and Audrey Sykes’s TEDxTUM presentation, recorded at the 2015 event and released online in 2016. The talk brought together the street project, the gallery work and the experience of watching an artwork take shape.

Read and watch: BBC in Singapore · Art Republik interview · Financial Times at Moniker · TEDxTUM talk

Ripley’s collection

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! acquired a Marilyn Monroe tape portrait, featured in its 2016 illustrated annual. A second Monroe portrait was displayed at Ripley’s in Hollywood, accompanied by an explanation of Zorn’s technique.

These portraits carry one of Zorn’s recurring interests into a museum attraction: a recognisable face, rebuilt in a material whose texture becomes apparent at close range. The acquisition adds a different chapter to the temporary exhibitions and museum collaborations elsewhere in his career.

Read: Ripley’s Believe It or Not!, 2016 illustrated annual, p. 9

2017 · CBS Sunday Morning

CBS Sunday Morning broadcast Jane Pauley’s feature on Zorn on 21 May 2017. Filmed in Amsterdam, it followed the work from the street-lamp idea to detailed pictures made from layers of tape. The segment gave a national American television audience a close look at a process that is difficult to grasp from a finished photograph alone.

Zorn returned to Moniker in London and Aqua Art Miami that year. The live demonstrations remained part of these presentations, allowing visitors to see the time, concentration and physical decisions behind the finished scenes.

Watch: CBS Sunday Morning: Creating Art with Tape and Scalpel

2018 · Berlin, Heidelberg & Düsseldorf

The Tape Art Convention at Neurotitan brought Zorn back to Berlin in July. In Heidelberg, his work featured in Kunst und Antidiskriminierung with Kunsthandel Bamberger on 25 May. A further exhibition took place with Rhein Asset Management in Düsseldorf’s Frank Gehry towers.

At SCOPE Miami Beach, Stick Together Gallery presented a solo selection of his tape artworks. Larger and multi-panel compositions had become part of the practice, giving the city scenes more space while retaining the same layer-by-layer construction. A lightbox could now hold an extended scene, as well as the intimate portrait that had first suited a street lamp.

Sources: Heyne Kunst Fabrik exhibition history · SCOPE Miami Beach 2018 presentation

2019 · New York, Heidelberg & larger installations

At Art New York, from 2 to 5 May, Zorn exhibited with Elka Bronner Gallery. In Heidelberg, Kunsthandel Bamberger presented Max Zorn & Shepard Fairey. A September exhibition with Truedat in Krefeld included a three-metre installation assembled from three tape artworks in the venue’s vaulted cellar, as described by the Rheinische Post.

SCOPE Miami Beach returned to the calendar in December. By this stage, the Miami presentations had built a lasting following among collectors. Looking back in a Widewalls interview, Zorn discussed that development alongside his wish to reserve more time for ambitious work in the studio.

Read: Rheinische Post on the Krefeld exhibition · Widewalls interview

2020–2021 · Studio work & the auction record

In his 2020 Widewalls interview, Zorn described the balance between travel, exhibitions and the time needed to make increasingly elaborate pictures. His interest remained in the stories that could be suggested through a setting, a gesture or a relationship between characters.

The auction record continued through this period. Days Like Leaves on a River appeared at Digard in 2020; Shimmers at Tajan and The Walk at Digard followed in 2021. These are part of a longer secondary-market history across Tajan, Digard, Julien’s and Chiswick, with later results at Heritage. The auction archive brings individual artworks, sale dates and results together.

2022–2023 · City Lights at MUCA

City Lights – Tape Art Max Zorn opened at the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art in Munich on 21 October 2022. Presented in the MUCA bunker, the solo exhibition brought together more than 25 large-scale artworks from different stages of his practice. Loans and commissioned works allowed visitors to see those periods together.

The exhibition concentrated on the relationship between the individual and the city: an intimate exchange inside a much larger urban environment, a lit room surrounded by darkness, lives unfolding behind windows. These are recurring concerns in Zorn’s pictures, whether they depict a crowded street or two people alone. MUCA extended the exhibition through the summer, with the final date set for 10 September 2023.

Alongside the museum exhibition, Zorn showed with Stick Together Gallery at District 13 Art Fair in Paris in September 2022 and SCOPE Miami Beach that November and December. The fair presentations and the museum survey offered different views of the same practice: recent work in one setting, and a longer view of its development in another.

Sources: MUCA’s City Lights exhibition archive · MUCA’s extension announcement

2023 · London, Düsseldorf & Miami

After the extended Munich exhibition, Zorn’s work appeared in Art Materialism with Catto Gallery in London. In Düsseldorf, Grafik, Bild & Kunst presented his tape art alongside works by Paul Schwietzke and Stephan Widera. The Rheinische Post described him working on a portrait of Billie Holiday, bringing the public encounter back to the details of how a picture is made.

Another presentation at SCOPE Miami Beach continued the collaboration with Stick Together Gallery. Over successive Miami exhibitions, sold-out presentations and returning collectors had made the city a central meeting point for Zorn and the audience for his work. Each new collection offered another opportunity to see how far he could take the medium.

Read: Rheinische Post on Düsseldorf · The Miami exhibition history in Widewalls

2024 · Bowie House & Hill-Stead Museum

In Fort Worth, Zorn’s tape artworks found a striking setting at The Gallery at Bowie House. NBC’s Texas Today featured him on 22 January 2024, introducing the process to viewers in North Texas. His work also forms part of Jo Ellard’s art collection at Bowie House, described in Forbes later that year.

At Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut, Zorn’s illuminated tape art was presented inside a red British telephone box as part of The Arethusa Collection: From Italian Renaissance to Contemporary British Art. Drawn from Tony Yurgaitis’s private collection, the exhibition ran from 16 November 2024 to 27 April 2025.

The telephone box extended the work beyond the conventional wall-mounted lightbox. A familiar piece of street architecture became a setting for the illuminated pictures, bringing an echo of Zorn’s original street installations into the museum. The year also included another presentation at SCOPE Miami Beach.

Read and watch: NBC Texas Today · Hill-Stead’s exhibition record

2025 · Five Nights in Amsterdam

Five Nights, from 14 to 18 April, brought a solo presentation back to Amsterdam with @gallery and Stick Together Gallery. After years of international exhibitions, the city in which Zorn began hanging tape artworks on street lamps welcomed him back for a five-night solo exhibition.

The year’s programme also included Urban Art Heroes in Düsseldorf, ARTMUC and Reshaping Reality at Bergson Kunstkraftwerk in Munich, and Max Zorn & Friends: Moments, Tales & Light in Düsseldorf. These appearances continued the movement between solo presentations, group exhibitions and live work that runs through the archive.

Read: Rheinische Post: Urban Art Heroes

2026 · Oklahoma City & the next exhibitions

In January, an invitation from Allied Arts brought Zorn to The Vault at First National in Oklahoma City, covered by News 9. The autumn programme returns to Düsseldorf for Max Zorn & Friends: Highlights, followed by the exclusive presentation of new tape artworks with The Sykes Gallery at Art Miami in December.

Read: News 9 on Oklahoma City · Art Miami 2026 visitor information