1,000,000 Dollars Marilyn Monroe
Details
Edition
Unique
Medium
Acrylic and Foil on Canvas
Signature
Signed
Unframed Dimensions
36 x 36 in
91.44 x 91.44 cm
Year
2020
MORE FROM THIS ARTIST
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Houben Tcherkelov, known professionally as Houben R.T. or RT Houben, is a Bulgarian-born contemporary painter whose pioneering practice reimagines the symbolic, political, and psychological power of currency. Born in 1970 in Bulgaria, he graduated with a degree in painting from the Conservative Art Academy in Sofia. While his early installations and video works achieved considerable recognition throughout Europe, Houben ultimately abandoned those mediums, finding them “too predictable,” and turned toward painting as the primary vehicle for his conceptual investigations.
A pivotal moment in his career came in 1996 when he received a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts Award for Residency in New York. This experience profoundly shaped his trajectory and ultimately led him to relocate permanently to New York City in 2000. Themes of post-communist society, including instability, propaganda, and economic upheaval, remain central to his practice. His early years in the United States, relying on coins to make payphone calls, further sharpened his interest in money as both a material and metaphor.
Houben is best known for his richly layered, highly reflective paintings that draw imagery from banknotes, bonds, checks, and other financial documents. Unlike Pop artists who focused on celebrities or mass-media icons, Houben turned his attention to the engines of wealth themselves. He has said that “the U.S. is characterized not by mass industrialization but by the rise and increasing sophistication of the financial sector,” and his work reflects this belief with conceptual clarity. His paintings engage with the politics of value, the fragility of economic systems, and the narratives nations construct through currency, a theme rooted in the Bulgarian banking crisis of the 1990s, when the national currency collapsed.
His artistic process is equally distinctive. Houben maintains the sensibility of an alchemist, creating pigments he grinds himself, treating raw color as both material and symbol. His style draws from Romanticism and Symbolism while asserting a bold Postmodernist energy. Heavy impasto, vivid saturated color, and gleaming surfaces often evoke commentary on excess, history, and mythmaking. His recurring depictions of Native Americans reference his earliest impressions of America, while influences from early European Romantics and East German western films contribute to the theatricality and cultural hybridity of his compositions.
RT Houben’s work has been exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. His paintings have appeared at institutions such as The Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Brogan Museum, and notably the 54th Venice Biennale. His exhibitions span Boston, Miami, New York, and Taipei, including multiple presentations with DTR Modern Galleries. Over decades of refinement, Houben has cultivated a strong reputation among collectors, art dealers, and curators for his bold reinterpretations of the iconography of money.
Explore RT Houben at DTR Modern Galleries
DTR Modern Galleries proudly exhibits RT Houben’s distinctive impasto currency works among its contemporary program. His paintings exist as meditations on power, value, and cultural memory, and can be discovered across our locations in Boston, New York City, Palm Beach, and Washington, D.C.
