What is tape art?

Tape art is art made with adhesive tape. Artists cut, tear, layer or stretch tape to create pictures, drawings and sculptures. The medium ranges from temporary street murals to original artworks in museum and private collections.

In a tape artwork, the tape remains part of the finished image or structure. This distinguishes it from painting techniques that use masking tape only to keep an edge clean. Brown packing tape, coloured duct tape and paper masking tape each offer different possibilities; some artists work with light passing through the material, while others draw directly across a wall or build an installation around the viewer.

The materials and main forms of tape art

“Tape art” describes a medium, not a single visual style. A drawing made from opaque strips behaves differently from an illuminated packing-tape picture. A sculptor may use tape to construct a hollow form, while an installation artist follows the dimensions of an entire room.

Artists also combine tape with other media. Projection mapping can add moving imagery to a taped composition, as in TAPE OVER’s collaboration with ONDÉ. The projection adds imagery to the surface; in a backlit picture, light passes through the tape itself.

Making a packing-tape artwork

In an illuminated packing-tape picture, overlapping layers control how much light passes through each part of the image. Max Zorn works on a clear acrylic panel with a scalpel, building the shading of a face or the reflections on a car by adding tape where the picture needs to be darker.

He lays tape over part of the composition, cuts a shape and peels away the section he does not need. The blade must pass through the intended layer without cutting into the image beneath it. In his CBS Sunday Morning demonstration, he described using around fifteen to seventeen layers in the darkest areas. The number varies with the artwork and the tone he wants to achieve.

The tape forms the picture itself. There is no printed image underneath. Close up, the overlapping strips and cut edges remain visible.

Brown packing tape gives the early works their sepia palette, which Max associates with old photographs and family albums. Coloured tape has expanded the range of later compositions. In Fire wrapped in melody, a Miami skyline extends across a 270 × 120 cm triptych, with the same hand-cut technique operating on a much larger scale.

The completed artwork is fitted into an LED lightbox. Light passes through the varying densities of tape to reveal the image, making illumination part of the artwork’s construction. These figurative pictures also belong to light art.

Explore Max Zorn’s process in detail →

A short history of tape art

There is no single beginning that accounts for every use of adhesive tape in art. Several practices developed at different times, from transferring printed images to drawing on buildings.

Early experiments: collage and the gallery wall

In the early 1960s, Gil J Wolman used adhesive tape to lift fragments of printed material for his Art Scotch works. This was a way of transferring and rearranging existing words and images. Jaime Davidovich introduced commercial tape into his Collage Tape Paintings in 1967, then extended the material across gallery walls in 1968. Both precede the better-known street-art uses by decades.

Public drawing and architectural space

The Tape Art collective in Providence, Rhode Island, was founded in 1989. Its collaborative drawings used low-adhesive tape on public buildings, with removal planned as part of the work.

Jim Lambie’s ZOBOP of 1999 follows a room’s perimeter with coloured vinyl tape, repeating the architectural outline across the floor. The arrangement adapts to the space in which it is installed.

Illuminated pictures and three-dimensional forms

Mark Khaisman was exhibiting packing-tape pictures by 2005. His figurative images use layers of packaging tape on Plexiglas with a lightbox, building tonal differences through the density of the material.

Mark Jenkins developed another use for packing tape: casting objects and human figures, which he placed in public settings. Monika Grzymala uses tape in spatial drawings, including her 2008 installation at the Chinati Foundation. Numen/For Use builds layers of tape into membranes that enclose a volume; visitors entered one of these structures at Palais de Tokyo in 2014. These projects expand the medium beyond a picture on a flat support.

Street art and an international field

El Bocho completed a large tape portrait on the façade of Stattbad Wedding in Berlin in 2009. Buff Diss uses tape for drawings that respond to buildings and public space. Max’s Amsterdam street-lamp artworks followed in 2011, introducing his particular combination of figurative imagery, layered packing tape and urban light.

Founded in Berlin in 2011, Tape That developed murals, room installations and collaborative projects. Its Taipei exhibition, which opened in 2019, received a Red Dot Best of the Best award for Exhibition Design in 2020. Other approaches include Darel Carey’s optical installations, where repeated lines make flat walls and floors appear to change depth, and Benjamin Murphy’s detailed electrical-tape drawings.

The Tape Art Convention at Neurotitan in Berlin in 2016 brought Max Zorn, Mark Khaisman, Buff Diss, Benjamin Murphy and Tape That into the same exhibition.

Explore the fuller history and artist profiles →

Tape art in public space

Tape can turn a public surface into a shared drawing. In Buffalo Caverns, commissioned by the museum now known as Buffalo AKG in 2014, passers-by helped the Tape Art collective create a mural on Buffalo Central Library and later helped remove it. Tape Art NZ has also developed a participatory practice, including a mural of visitor profiles at Ashburton Art Gallery in 2015.

Existing street lighting offered another possibility. In Amsterdam in 2011, Max Zorn began attaching small artworks to lamps, where the light shone through the tape. He had wanted to make street art that could be seen after dark by using the lights already present in the city.

In an Art Business News interview, he recalls making marker sketches on Plexiglas and noticing how a piece of brown tape used to attach one looked against the light. The next morning he tried cutting and layering tape on his kitchen window with a sushi knife. The first attempt was ugly, he said, and difficult to remove.

As the technique developed, explaining it became another problem. People could see a picture but could not understand how packing tape had produced it. Max filmed himself making a small artwork on a window and put the video online. The response brought enquiries from galleries and people wanting to buy or exhibit the work, allowing him to spend more time developing it.

Through Stick Together, he sent handmade artworks to people who chose public lights in their own cities, installed the pictures and shared photographs. Participants also began making and exchanging their own creations. Max described that exchange at TED@Amsterdam in 2012.

Max’s street art began in Amsterdam and travelled through the historical Stick Together project. Explore street-lamp artworks in Amsterdam and around the world, with photographs and films from the archive.

Cinema, cities and the people in the pictures

The cars and buildings in Max Zorn’s scenes often look recognisable without belonging to a single place or decade. In his BBC interview, he describes combining cars from the 1920s and 1950s so they seem to inhabit the same world. Remembered details from films become part of a composition he develops himself.

The resemblance to film noir comes partly from those settings and the use of strong contrasts, but the people are equally important. Speaking to Deutsche Welle, Max names Hemingway, Steinbeck and Salinger among his literary interests, particularly their flawed characters. A figure waiting outside a bar or standing beside a car can suggest a situation without settling what happened before or what happens next.

Individual artworks give those interests more precise form. Empire Rain grew from nights spent walking through unfamiliar cities and imagining the lives behind their windows. In Maraluna Beach, Max chose a place of personal importance as an alternative to a conventional self-portrait. For Tango, he described watching a couple communicate through movement and touch at an Argentine tango event.

“I want them to feel familiar enough to you to connect and add on your own stories.”

The Financial Times described the pictures’ “Hollywood-noir glamour” after watching Max work at Moniker Art Fair in London. Max describes these compositions as fiction, even when their settings seem familiar.

Browse the artwork gallery →

Exhibitions and museum collections

Tape artworks appear in museum collections in several forms. The National Galleries of Scotland holds Lambie’s 1999 ZOBOP; MoMA holds a separate installation from 2006. The Delaware Art Museum acquired Khaisman’s 2006 packing-tape picture No darling, thank heavens, I can’t remember a wife in 2007.

At the Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art in Munich, Max Zorn’s solo exhibition City Lights ran in 2022–2023. It brought together artworks from different stages of his career, including loans from private collections and a work commissioned for the museum.

For the Dutch Resistance Museum, he made illuminated portraits of children who lived through the Second World War. Presented during Amsterdam Light Festival in 2013–2014, Children of the War included portraits of Eva, Jan, Nelly and Henk at the entrance, with another portrait in the auditorium.

At Hill-Stead Museum in Connecticut, a tape artwork installed inside a red British telephone box appeared in The Arethusa Collection in 2024–2025. It came from Tony Yurgaitis’s private collection. Max’s record also includes My Time, My Town at Amsterdam Museum in 2014 and the 2015 group exhibition Reimagined at Cornell Art Museum in Florida, which focused on unconventional art materials. Ripley’s Believe It or Not! acquired one of his Marilyn Monroe tape artworks.

Zorn’s artworks have also been shown at SCOPE Miami Beach, Aqua Art Miami and CONTEXT Art Miami, alongside Moniker in London, District 13 in Paris and Affordable Art Fair in Hong Kong and Singapore. The exhibition archive records past shows and upcoming appearances.

Making the work in public

Watching an artwork being made can answer questions that a finished image leaves open. Max has explained that visitors sometimes liked a picture without realising it was made from tape. Demonstrations let them follow each decision. At one fair, he invited visitors to add tape themselves, incorporating some pieces and removing others.

His public demonstrations include SXSW in Austin and a presentation with Audrey Sykes at TEDxTUM. The International Media archive includes interviews and demonstrations from BBC News, CNN Style, CBS Sunday Morning, Deutsche Welle and NBC Texas Today.

Explore the pictures

Original tape artworks by Max Zorn

City encounters, open water, classic cars and imagined escapes. These artworks introduce different parts of Max’s visual world; the linked pages provide more context and collecting information.

Collecting original tape art

The intended life of a tape artwork depends on what the artist has made. A temporary public drawing may be removed at the end of an event. A framed tape picture can be made for long-term display.

Originals and Similar Originals

Max’s artworks are made by hand and supplied in custom LED lightboxes. Some compositions are developed as limited series of Similar Originals. Each is cut and layered anew, with small differences arising during the making. They are original tape artworks, not reproductions printed from a master image, and the maximum size of the series is fixed.

For a collector, the artwork’s title, dimensions, signature and series information establish which individual piece they own. Information about the lightbox and its power supply also matters, because illumination is part of how the work is displayed. The Buy page explains collecting from the studio and where to enquire about available artworks.

Longevity, display and maintenance

Max’s collector artworks protect the tape between acrylic panels, with UV-resistant glazing and low-heat LED illumination. They are intended for indoor display. Avoid prolonged direct sunlight, strong heat and damp conditions; the care and longevity guide covers suitable placement and maintenance.

The artwork and its lighting are separate components. If an adapter or LED component needs replacement, the tape image does not need to be remade. The studio can advise on the correct part and access for a particular lightbox. Conservation questions should take account of the individual work’s construction, condition and display history.

Public auction history

Max’s artworks have appeared at auction for more than a decade, with sales through Tajan and Digard in Paris, Julien’s in Los Angeles, Chiswick in London and Heritage in Dallas. The auction-results archive provides the individual records.

Common questions about tape art

Who invented tape art?

Different forms developed independently. Wolman and Davidovich used tape in fine art in the 1960s; later artists developed public drawings, illuminated pictures and sculptural installations. The medium’s full history cannot be attributed to one inventor.

Max Zorn pioneered illuminated packing-tape street art. In Amsterdam in 2011, he began placing hand-cut tape portraits on street lamps, using their existing light to reveal the images. Through Stick Together, people around the world received his artworks and installed them in their own cities. These street-lamp portraits were the starting point for the larger tape artworks he now exhibits in galleries, at international art fairs and in museums.

Does all tape art need a lightbox?

No. Opaque tape drawings and most murals are seen with ordinary room lighting or daylight. In Max’s artworks, light passes through the layers to reveal their different tones. The LED lightbox supplies the illumination the picture needs.

How long does it take to make a tape artwork?

Size, detail and the development of the composition all affect the time required. In a TEDxTUM presentation with Max Zorn, Audrey Sykes described some artworks taking four weeks or longer. A short live demonstration shows the method; a finished exhibition artwork involves much more work. Production time is also different from the delivery wait for an allocated artwork.

Will a tape artwork fade or fall apart?

Tape products, supports and display conditions vary, so there is no single lifespan for the whole medium. Max’s originals are constructed for long-term indoor display with protective acrylic and an LED lightbox. Appropriate placement and care help preserve their condition. For an existing artwork or a purchase, the studio can explain its construction and any maintenance needs.

For the materials, construction and advice on displaying an artwork, read the tape art materials, longevity and care guide.

Are Max Zorn’s tape artworks prints?

No. The image is made from actual layers of tape cut by Max. In a series of Similar Originals, the composition is made again by hand for each artwork rather than mechanically reproduced. Each series has a fixed limit.

How can I collect directly from Max’s studio?

The annual Special Releases, long known as Special Sales, introduce a new art collection through this website at introductory prices. When requests exceed availability, a lottery selects the collectors offered an artwork. Some originals are made after allocation, and waiting times can reach twelve months. The release page explains participation; the Buy page covers other collecting enquiries.