If you think brown packing tape is used only for packing boxes or sticking things together, think again? Max Zorn makes art out of it! In fact, this artist uses this tape as his only medium to create masterpieces on the acrylic glass that leave the viewers totally gobsmacked.
This Dutch street artist, who has been creating this art since May 2011, needs only brown packing tapes and a scalpel to cut and slice the tape with. Of course, his artwork needs to be lighted from behind to be seen, for which he uses the acrylic glass sheet as his canvas.
According to him, brown packing tape gives an amazing sepia-tone effect that reminds one of the photographs of yesteryears. He augments this by choosing scenes when sepia-toned photographs were prevalent. His street art realistically depicts the age and time of his scenes.
Zorn’s unique art came to be noticed when he hung his translucent tape art from street lamps. It was soon picked up by national and international media. This egged him on to create more and, today, he has a huge collection of tape art that can be seen on his website.
So, what prompted Zorn to take up this form of art. In a TEDx Talent Search talk, he explains,
“I didn’t want to work on walls or on the floor; I wanted to use street lamps as an urban gallery and I wanted to use the darkness as the setting around my artwork.”
This idea came to him in his hometown, Amsterdam, the Netherlands, while on a night jog. His creative mind saw the potential of the lamps illuminating the pathways of the city at night and hit upon the idea of acrylic glass since it could be illuminated from behind by these lamps. And the translucent packing tape fitted the bill most charmingly.
Zorn’s inspiration remains the classic novels by writers, such as Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, and Tom Wolfe and American realism artists, like Edward Hopper and others.
Zorn has held many solo shows of his works, the first being in Paris. Since then, he has displayed his works in solo exhibitions in many other cities across the globe, participated in Art Basel in Hong Kong and Miami, and also displayed his works in national museums of several cities.
Zorn’s works have also been showcased by CNN, BBC, and Al Jazeera. He has a fan following of over 56,000 on Instagram alone.
TapeArt by Max Zorn
