How Max Zorn Makes Tape Art

Packing tape, a blade and light

Max makes original tape art by cutting and layering packing tape on transparent acrylic glass. There is no printed picture beneath it. The faces, buildings and reflections are formed by the material itself, with light passing through the finished image.

Building the tones

A single layer of brown tape lets more light through than several overlapping layers. A bright window and the dark coat of someone standing beside it can therefore be made from the same tape. Max builds their difference by adding material, cutting shapes and removing selected pieces.

Max Zorn cuts fine details into the layered tape of Let them have the rest… with a precision knife. — A close view of the cutting: the blade works within layers already carrying the city scene.

Max Zorn holds a cut strip of packing tape against the illuminated buildings of Let them have the rest… — Overlapping strips create the transitions between the buildings, windows and crowds.

A cut becomes part of the drawing

The blade has to reach the intended layer. A deeper cut can lift away material Max wanted to keep. In his CBS Sunday Morning interview, he demonstrates how each addition must be adjusted against the image beneath it. A small change can alter the expression of a face or the edge of a reflection.

The tape also affects the composition. Its straight edges and overlapping shapes suggest possibilities as Max works. In his TEDxTUM presentation with Audrey Sykes, he describes responding to what develops on the acrylic. The making involves decisions about the picture as well as control of the knife.

From a city at night to an open horizon

Brown tape gives many of Max’s scenes the colour of an old photograph, but his compositions need not belong to one remembered place or period. In his BBC News interview, he describes bringing cars from different decades into the same image. Familiar details become part of an imagined story.

In Sail, the pace changes. Palm trees frame the water and the sailboat; the wide sky leaves room around them. The process photographs show how these open, pale passages sit beside the densely layered palms.

Max Zorn works with tape and a precision knife on Sail, with palm trees, ocean and a sailboat behind his hands. — *Sail* in progress: Max adjusts the tape between the palms and the open sky.

A roll of packing tape and a precision knife hang against the backlit palms and sailboat of Max Zorn’s Sail. — The materials in front of the image they are making.

Max Zorn uses a precision knife near a woman’s lips in Crossroads, a backlit tape artwork with palm trees. — Max Zorn shaping the portrait in *Crossroads*: the expression emerges from cuts and overlapping tape.

Max also works with coloured packing tape. The red dress in this early stage of The great escape already draws the eye across the incomplete composition. Colour comes from the tape itself, while the same layering process builds the darker folds and the panda’s face.

The great escape in progress: a woman in a red dress beside a panda, with coloured tape rolls against the illuminated panel. — An unfinished stage of *The great escape*, with red and brown tape still hanging beside the figures.

Watching the artwork happen

At international art fairs, Max often works in front of an audience. From a distance, visitors see a picture. Up close, they can follow the cut, the strip being lifted and the change it makes to the scene.

A visitor watches Max Zorn making an illuminated tape artwork at an international art fair. — A visitor watches the work take shape.

Visitors watch and photograph Max Zorn creating an illuminated tape artwork at an international art fair. — Live creation makes the handwork visible alongside finished artworks.

In his Art Business News interview, Max explains how demonstrating the process helped people understand the material. The finished work has also been presented in museums: City Lights, his 2022–2023 solo exhibition at Munich’s Museum of Urban and Contemporary Art, brought together artworks from different stages of his practice.

The finished artwork, illuminated

The image is made to be seen with light passing through it. Backlighting reveals the separation between the thin tape and the densely layered areas, from a pale face to a dark street below. The light is part of how the picture is seen.

Let them have the rest… by Max Zorn, an illuminated tape-art triptych in black frames with a couple above a crowded theatre district. — *Let them have the rest…* in its illuminated frames: the finished view of the scene shown in progress above.

Collector artworks use custom LED lightboxes. Protective glazing and the frame belong to the finished object, with the construction and format depending on the artwork. The care, framing and display guide explains the lighting, protection and practical details of living with original tape art.

A process that began on Amsterdam’s streets

Max began placing small tape artworks on Amsterdam street lamps in 2011. The city supplied the light, and passers-by became the audience. Through the historical Stick Together project, other people carried handmade artworks to new places and returned photographs of their installations.

The street art archive follows that public side of the work. The history of tape art places Max’s approach beside other artists’ uses of adhesive tape.

See the artworks

Explore the artwork gallery for city scenes, portraits and coastal settings. The Similar Originals guide explains how Max makes each artwork separately by hand within a defined series.

For collecting questions, Audrey and the team can help with an artwork enquiry. For an introduction to the wider medium, return to the Tape Art guide.

How Max Zorn makes tape art