MATCH POP ART

It all started with a bookmark. Years ago, when I was travelling through the Baltic states, I stayed in a small hotel in Tallinn that had a communal shelf for books – take one, leave one. I picked up a few well-worn paperbacks, but none of them really grabbed me. Then I found this weird edition of a horror story. Inside the book, there was a bookmark that was pretty unusual: it was a flat American matchbook, advertising a lottery with bright colours and bold typography. “Win $21,000.00 Cash!” it said. There was just one match left, folded down carefully. I usually can’t stand horror, but I started reading from the spot the matchbook marked. The story about a janitor in a high-rise haunted by ghosts was surprisingly well written. I don’t remember if the janitor survived in the end and the book stayed behind in Tallinn – but the matchbook-bookmark has travelled with me ever since, stashed in my travel wallet with my passport.

Matchbooks were invented in the late 19th century. They’re small paperboard folders that hold one or two rows of matches and a striking surface on the outside. They were easy to carry around, and people loved them as both practical items and advertising tools. Businesses saw matchbooks as a cost-effective way to promote themselves, printing their logos, slogans, and artwork on the covers. The first major advertising matchbooks appeared in the 1890s, and by the early 1900s, big companies were ordering millions to hand out to customers.
Back in the day, matchbooks were used to advertise all sorts of different products and services. You could spot ads for bars, restaurants, hotels, nightclubs, airlines, filling stations, and all kinds of events, even operas. Their bright colours and creative designs make them real collectable items. As smoking went down and disposable lighters became the norm, matchbooks lost their popularity, but they remain collectibles and are still used as fancy advertising items in some high-end venues.

So, what inspired me to create Match Pop Art? It’s another personal discovery, this time flipping through an outstanding design book: POP ART DESIGN, published by the Vitra Design Museum. I became aware of the fascination with everyday objects not only of American pop artists, but also of their European counterparts, the Nouveau Réalistes (New Realists). I must admit that I never paid the same attention to all of them. One of them is Christo, who became hugely popular alongside Jeanne-Claude. As well as hiding and wrapping things, buildings and entire landscapes like this couple did, one could also destroy and burn. Taking a more Zero-like approach (Zero was a 1960s art movement emphasizing light, motion, and space), Bernard Aubertin (1934-2015) used to burn thousands of matches in his fire paintings and drawings. Aubertin, began creating “Tableaux de feu” in 1961. These monochrome red panels were studded with rows of matches, which Aubertin often ignited during gallery exhibitions, leaving behind charred grids and, at times, incorporating burned matchbooks into the work (Boîtes d’allumettes brûlées, 1974). His practice fused painting, performance, and sculpture, foregrounding real combustion as both material and metaphor. In homage to his passion for burning, I added a third incinerated match to the two in my design piece Superamerica.  

Three other figures of the 1960s and 70s—Raymond Hains, Claes Oldenburg, and César—transformed matches into sculptural icons, exploring themes of consumer culture, industrial production, and the tension between everyday use and spectacle. Their projects span gigantic outdoor monuments, gallery-scale objects and serial wall pieces.

Raymond Hains, a founding member of Nouveau Réalisme, began exhibiting his “Saffa” and “Seita” works in Venice and Paris in the early 1960s. These were human-sized plywood enlargements of Italian and French matchbooks, complete with sandpaper striking surfaces rendered in abrasive paint. Hains pushed the concept further with billboard-scale reliefs, such as the “Saffa Super Matchbox” now housed at MoMA. His series continued into the 1970s, featuring monumental bronze “giant matches.” Through these works, Hains offered a witty critique of branding and monopoly culture, drawing attention to the power of everyday objects in shaping our perceptions. 

Claes Oldenburg, a pioneer of Pop Art, introduced his first matchbook sculpture in 1964 with “Giant Soft Matchbook with Two Matches,” a drooping vinyl pillow that echoed his earlier sculptures of pastries and cigarettes. Oldenburg later revisited the motif on a public scale with Mistos (Match Cover), a colossal painted-steel matchbook installed for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics. Though conceived decades earlier, the work fits squarely within the Pop tradition of transforming ordinary items into outsized, playful monuments.

César’s match combustions are less well-known than his famous “compressions” of metal and everyday objects, but they are a genuine part of his oeuvre. In these pieces, the act of burning becomes a creative gesture, echoing the Nouveau Réalisme interest ephemeral processes. The result is a direct, physical record of energy and destruction, with the matches themselves serving as both medium and metaphor. Alongside Bernard Aubertin, César stands out as a major artist who used matches not just as objects, but as active agents in the making of art.

Last but certainly not least among these illustrious artists is Andy Warhol. The title of his 1962 painting, “Close Cover Before Striking“, comes from the standard warning text found on matchbooks. This everyday piece of commercial material was appropriated by Warhol for his art. The resulting painting is representative of Warhol’s characteristic approach of elevating mundane imagery into fine art. It exemplifies his early period, during which he explored American consumer culture imagery by transforming promotional materials from popular brands into gallery-worthy artworks. The painting demonstrates his interest in the intersection of art and commerce by using recognisable corporate branding as artistic subject matter.

For all of the great thinkers and artists mentioned, the match and the matchbook symbolized the ubiquity and disposability of modern consumption. By scaling matches up to monumental proportions, burning them, or putting matchbooks like paintings on walls, they dramatized the tensions inherent in the consumer landscape of the 1960s. Their works reveal how even the smallest and most ordinary objects can ignite significant cultural meaning. I discovered Haines’ work in the Vitra Design Museum’s Pop Art Design catalogue. One of the final chapters shows the rooms of the art collector Gunter Sachs, who not only decorated with Pop Art, but surrounded himself with a great number of colourful art objects. One of Haines’s sculptures, an open matchbox, is displayed prominently on a living room wall. Seeing these works outside of a museum context for the first time inspired my design idea.

I feel in good company with these artists, whom I adore, as I try to follow in their giant footsteps. My idea is to take the physical make-up of the matchbook and enlarge it, without taking away any of its features. Warhol is relevant here, as he was more interested in the advertising message on the cover of a Coca-Cola matchbook. He attached the two-dimensional striking surface to his painting in the form of sandpaper, but avoided the other sculptural aspects, as he mostly did in his body of work. My pop art matchbook designs seem like straight sculptural enlargements of commercial matchbooks, blown up to around 10 to 15 times their regular size, but they are not. The designs on the front covers and flaps are edited and rearranged to different degrees to amplify or alter the original message. This is what sets my objects apart from the pieces matchbook collectors crave: they are decorative art, not authentic reproductions of historic advertising material. 

So, how is it made? I can’t deny that I enjoy blowing things up. By that, I mean enlarging, which was one of the processes involved in making pictures taken on film come to life before digital photography. I had several darkrooms and used them for years. The size of a matchbook cover is roughly equivalent to that of a film negative, and it’s not unusual to enlarge (or print) a negative onto photographic paper measuring 30 x 40 cm (approximately 12 x 18 inches), or even larger. The printed, enlarged matchbooks measure around 40 x 50 cm (15 x 19 inches), which is over ten times the original size. I use modern reproduction and scanning machines to capture every detail of the lovingly designed covers, including any imperfections. The prints are produced using a Hewlett-Packard eight-colour giclée machine. The prints are mounted on acid-free board and cut out by hand. They are then folded into the typical matchbook envelope. The sandpaper striking surface is added before the oversized metal clamp is put into the matchbook, because the clamp sometimes goes through it in the original design. The metal clamp is placed where the original staple would be on a real-world matchbook. This staple holds the row or rows of cardboard matches in place. It’s almost the same in my construction; without the clamp, it would fall apart. Before the large clamp is put into the large matchbook, the sandpaper striking surface is added, because in most cases the clamp goes through it in the original design. One, two or three matches stick out of one or both sides of the envelope. These long pieces of cardboard or wood have sculpted strike-anywhere heads (containing no harmful chemicals like sulfur or phosphorus!), which are covered in acrylic paint in the distinctive red (or sometimes brown or grey) that defines a factory-made match. 

The devil is in the detail, particularly the irregular shapes of some of the best-designed matchboxes. These shapes catch the eye, but they’re difficult to cut out by hand — it’s more like carving. The whole thing is then attached to the back of a handmade gallery frame with screws. I use acrylic glass to protect the already very stable original HP printing inks from fading. It’s a fun process, with the most exciting moment being when the prints come out of the machine and reveal all the imperfections, which almost feel tangible. By recreating haptic elements such as the clamp and rows of matches, I enhance the trompe l’œil effect. Overall, I magnify and celebrate a tiny, everyday object that fits neatly in a trouser pocket and was even used as a bookmark in cheap horror novels.

Click on the images to learn more about the framed Match Pop Art pieces shown.

All Match Pop Art 3D objects