How Houben R.T. Turns the World’s Currency into Contemporary Iconography. He paints money, yes. But what he is really painting is the thing we all, in our better moments, still hope money represents: trust, value, the possibility of exchange. These are not small things. And in his hands, they become something approaching grace.
I first encountered Houben Tcherkelov’s work years ago in a private collection in Dubai – a piece based on the old 1,000-dirham note, long before the current Sheikh Zayed portrait became standard. It stopped me then, and it stopped me again recently when we sat down to talk via video call, the artist framed by his Times Square studio, the chaos of global finance humming somewhere beneath his feet. He is 56 and carries himself with the quiet confidence of someone who has spent two decades refining a single, obsessive vision.
The Alchemist’s Gambit
“You know,” he says, leaning back, “the Bulgarian banking crisis of the 1990s stripped three zeroes from our currency overnight. Three zeroes. Imagine waking up and discovering that the numbers representing your life’s work have become a typo.”
That moment – the visceral evaporation of value – planted a seed that would take years to fully bloom. Tcherkelov studied painting at the National Academy of Arts in Sofia, fell in with the radical crowd at XXL Gallery, and spent his early years documenting post-communist society through photographs, films and installations. His video Suitable Suit, in which he lumbers through a field wearing a garment many sizes too large, remains one of the most poignant commentaries on the gap between aspiration and reality during Eastern Europe’s transition years.
But New York changed him. Arriving in 2000, he found a city that no longer made things – not really. “Only financial services remain,” he says with a shrug that manages to be both fatalistic and amused. “So I paint what’s around me. I’m a traditional painter in that sense. Van Gogh painted his chair, his bedroom. Lucas Cranach painted the German court. I paint money.”
The statement lands with the weight of obvious truth, which is perhaps the surest sign of its profundity.
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The Glitch as Gospel
Walk into any serious contemporary collection today and you will find artists grappling with questions of value – but few have embedded themselves in its mechanics quite like Tcherkelov. His process is a kind of sacramental alchemy: he begins with water-based acrylic underpainting, a technique borrowed from Eastern Orthodox iconography, then applies metallic foil using heat-transfer methods. The foil catches light the way a saint’s riza – the precious metal covering traditional icons – catches the flicker of votive candles. Only here, the saint has been replaced by Andrew Jackson or Alexander Hamilton, or, in his more recent work, the haunting masks of Congolese currency.
“I embrace the glitches,” he tells me, and there is a glint in his eye that suggests he is not entirely joking when he compares himself to Dr Manhattan from Watchmen, perceiving past, present and future simultaneously. ““Heat transfer is the main tool in my recent work… The ‘transfer’ is designed to replicate financial wire transactions – including fees and delays – and when cables are involved, glitches inevitably occur. Since I hope my paintings contain information – historical, financial, political or art-historical – glitches are to be expected.”
It is a beautiful inversion: the “failure” becomes the very thing that authenticates the work. In an age of digital reproduction, where NFTs promise perfect fidelity, Tcherkelov courts imperfection the way a connoisseur values the irregularity of handmade paper. His 2024 NFT collection In Crypto We Trust acknowledges the blockchain revolution even as his paintings insist on the irreplaceable presence of the human hand.
The Koons Corollary
No conversation about contemporary art and commerce can avoid the elephant in the room – or rather, the rabbit, the balloon dog, the stainless-steel icon. Tcherkelov collaborated with sculptor Tom Sachs in 2000 — not as an assistant to Jeff Koons, as is sometimes assumed — absorbing lessons about consumerism that would inform his practice.
“Andy Warhol is my role model,” he says plainly. “It’s worth it depending on the artist’s ability to make it appealing to others.”
This sounds crasser in transcription than it does in conversation. Tcherkelov delivers it with the matter-of-factness of a master craftsman discussing joinery. The difference, of course, is that Warhol painted Campbell’s soup cans – objects of consumption. Tcherkelov paints the means by which consumption is made possible. It is a subtle shift, but it changes everything.
“The previous generation of Pop Art reflected the desire for material objects,” he explains. “I’m interested in the evolution from material goods to net worth. When you paint a dollar bill, you’re not painting something you can eat or wear. You’re painting pure abstraction dressed up as representation.”
The View from 56
There is a moment in our conversation when I ask about the political dimensions of his work – rising nationalism, digital borders, the strange persistence of sovereignty in an age of cryptocurrency. Tcherkelov waves it away with the gentlest possible dismissal.
“Art doesn’t influence this. I connect people through shared aesthetics. Art can point out issues and enhance life, but it cannot directly shape society or cause political change.”
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It is the answer of someone who has lived through enough ideological convulsions to remain sceptical of art’s capacity to save the world. His early work in Sofia was explicitly political; his current practice is, if anything, post-political. He paints what he sees. If viewers find meaning in the juxtaposition of Andrew Jackson’s portrait and the metallic shimmer of foil, that meaning belongs to them.
“These days, I’m less judgemental,” he says. “I don’t believe art can transform society, and I don’t see that as my purpose any more.”
The honesty is refreshing, even a little bracing. In an art world that often mistakes earnestness for importance, Tcherkelov’s wry detachment feels like a kind of wisdom.
The Future, Seen All at Once
What does a man paint when he has spent two decades examining the iconography of money? Birds, apparently.
“In an ideal world, I’d concentrate on nature,” he admits. “Birds and animals. I’ll get there eventually.”
But first, there is the small matter of the entire globe to document. His studio currently holds two works in progress: a portrait of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan for a piece based on the 1,000-dirham note, and a painting of the hoiho – the yellow-eyed penguin – from New Zealand’s five-dollar bill. They could not be more different, and that is precisely the point.
“If I borrow subjects from different currencies, I can tap into the energy of any territory, any historical period,” he says. “Time doesn’t move in a straight line for me. I see it all at once.”
It is a fitting image for an artist whose work circulates globally like the very currency he paints. His pieces hang in collections from Taipei to Trieste, from Boston to Sofia. They have been featured at the Bronx Museum, the 54th Venice Biennale and, this autumn, in a solo exhibition positioning him as one of the most distinctive voices working at the intersection of art and value.
The Happiness of Paint
I ask him, toward the end of our conversation, about the phrase that keeps appearing in descriptions of his work: “the painting’s own happiness”. It comes from Genesis P-Orridge’s observation that Tcherkelov’s pieces seem to contain a trapped spirit that remains inexplicably joyful.
He considers this for a long moment. “My goal is to capture the spirit of the original while maintaining the painting’s own happiness. When it works, each piece becomes a mirror – a reflection of how a culture wanted to represent itself, seen through a 21st-century lens.”
The answer is characteristically oblique, but I think I understand. Standing in front of a Tcherkelov painting – whether it is the 2 Colones Mona Lisa from 2024 or an early work based on American banknotes – you become aware of layers upon layers. There is the historical layer: the founding father, the national symbol, the claim to legitimacy. There is the material layer: the foil, the impasto, the brushwork that machines cannot replicate. And there is something else, something harder to name – a kind of shimmer that is not merely visual. It is the trace of a man in a Times Square studio, thinking about birds and banknotes and the strange persistence of beauty in a world built on abstraction.
