The 25 Most Magnificent Works Of Art Made From Money

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While most artists make money from their art, a handful of talented folk make art from their money. One such innovator is tattoo artist Scott Campbell who laser cuts detailed graphics into stacks of bills.

In honor of Campbell's first European solo show, opening at Galerie Gmurzynska’s Zurich location on January 25th, we've curated a gallery of the 25 most magnificent works of money art. In addition to two pieces by Campbell, you'll be blown away by amazing mosaics, sculptures and murals that manipulate money's iconography and bold typography in endlessly interesting ways.

Check out The 25 Most Magnificent Works Of Art Made With Money.

skull

One-Dollar Skull

Born in New Orleans and based in Brooklyn, tattoo artist Scott Campbell laser cuts intricate designs into piles of bills to create interesting sculptures that comment on our consumer economy. Each dollar used in this skull relief was cut separately then arranged in a 100-dollar stack. (Photo: DesignBoom)

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One-Dollar Koi

Designer Won Park creates amazingly realistic origami from single dollar bills. In addition to animals, Park has made buildings, racecars, and even Star Wars spacecrafts, all with the extreme detail seen in this one-dollar koi fish. (Photo: DeviantArt)

state

Instrument of State

British artist Justine Smith has always enjoyed working with paper and uses bills from various countries to make collages, prints and sculptures that examine our political, moral and social relationship with money. This grenade sculpture uses Chinese yuans to represent the money used to fund fighting and bloodshed. (Photo: Justine Smith)

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Dollar Pinwheel

Brooklyn artist Mark Wagner’s money collages have been featured at The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Getty—to name a few. Meticulous and graphic, Wagner cuts and pastes pieces of bills to find “the foreign in the familiar,” as he puts it. (Photo: EscapeIntoLife.com)

spend it

Hey Big Spender

London-based artist Adrian Firth uses thousands of pence to craft mosaic-style portraits that speak to the current corruption in the financial industry. This piece of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown is on the money… literally. (Photo: Adrian Firth)

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Quixotic Ambition

C.K. Wilde, another Brooklyn-based artist, uses carefully cut fragments of currency from around the world to create collages with political and social underpinnings. “Quixotic Ambition” seems to compare Don Quixote’s false chivalry in chasing windmills to modern warfare’s guise of heroism in chasing oil. (Photo: artichokeyinkpress.com)

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Dollar Unicorn

23-year-old Latvian artist Irina Truhanova sketches her subjects in pencil prior to filling in the details with fragments of dollar bills. Since freedom, independence and capitalism are themes throughout her work, Irina felt currency was the most logical medium to use. (Photo: The Telegraph)

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3-D Carved Heart

This anatomical heart, another piece from tattoo artist Scott Campbell, was carved from three stacks of bills piled 500 high, a volume that allowed him to produce a deep, three-dimensional sculpture. As a nod to classic tattoo culture, his designs often feature anatomy and skulls, in addition to religious iconography, flowers and butterflies. (Photo: OHWOW)

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My Money, My Currency

The bills pictured here are just of few of Hanna von Goeler’s 500 altered banknotes. A graduate of The Rhode Island School of Design, Hanna believes that drawing and painting on money allows the viewer to notice its reproductive quality and overall texture. She seeks to explore the degree to which we have the ability to define, rather than be defined by, our currency. (Photo: Hanna von Goeler)

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Obama vs. McCain

At the height of the 2008 presidential election, Brooklyn artist Ted Stanke created this mosaic, made of chopped up American coins. Obama is made primarily from pennies and McCain from nickels because Stanke hoped to highlight the distribution of wealth between the candidates. (Photo: Mosaicartsource.com)

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Washington Dog

In addition to weaponry, Justine Smith creates less abrasive sculptures like this dog. Her recent work has also included bunches of banknote flowers and signs created with coins. (Photo: Justine Smith)

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Craftsman’s Tools

Metalsmith Stacey Lee Webber tips her hat to a simpler way of life and blue-collar America with these sculptures made by hammering, cutting and soldering discarded pennies into hollow, three dimensional tools. Webber’s largest pieces in the penny series are a stepladder and two shovels, each of which took her nearly six months to complete. (Photo: Stacey Lee Webber)

asia

Asian Dragon

A well-known political cartoonist and award-winning children’s book illustrator, David McLimans creates collages from all sorts of papers: maps, stamps, sheet music and as seen here, money. Like this dragon made from Asian banknotes, McLiman’s work tends to be playful and bold.

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Portrait Collage

This eclectic portrait is another brilliant work by Mark Wagner. While Wagner’s pieces look laser-cut, he’s a master of the X-ACTO knife and carves the individual components of his collages by hand. While the two collages we’ve included are rather straightforward, Wagner has also made a number of fascinating surreal creations. (Photo: EscapeIntoLife.com)

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Donald Trump

Artist Sean Diediker, an oil painter by trade, creates currency collages via a slightly different technique: he folds the bills as opposed to cutting them. He used about $1,400 worth of $1 bills to create this portrait of “The Donald.” (Photo: Sean Diediker)

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M1 A2

In a series called “Taxcut,” artist Chad Person created pictures of guns, tanks, fighter planes and military ships out of dollar bills. He decided to use currency as his medium to point out the association of money with power, and power with America’s Manifest Destiny mindset. (Photo: designboom)

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Coin Sofa

Johnny Swing, the artist who created this awesome couch, is dedicated to making functional objects out of re-purposed materials. His topsy-turvy pieces of furniture have a pop quality that make them fun to look at and touch. We’d take this couch made entirely of pennies over the standard sofa any day. (Photo: HomeReviews.com)

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Van Gogh’s Ear

A master of manipulation, James Charles began drawing movie characters, fast food mascots, artists and rock and roll legends on bills for his own personal amusement. After spending his first few creations, Charles decided to keep his works of pop culture art in a scrapbook. It was a good move: his altered bills now sell for $600-$1,000. (Photo: MyModernMet.com)

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Moneycycle

In addition to this “Moneycycle,” Lativian artist Irina Truhanova has made dollar collages of other vehicles, including a sweet Bentley Continental and several Harley models. (Photo: The Telegraph)

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Space Available

Just the top half of a larger collage by C.K. Wilde, “Space Available-inquire within” shows the staggering array of colors Wilde is able to cull and artfully combine. Wilde’s work has appeared in galleries and museums across the globe. (Photo: artichokeyinkpress.com)

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Lizzie

Playfully named “Lizzie,” a nickname Her Majesty has never assumed, this portrait by Adrian Firth expertly uses the dirt found on each penny to create tone and texture. While coins are Firth’s usual medium, he was recently commissioned by Gemstone Creative to make a portrait of Jay-Z using 22,500 Swarovski crystals. (Photo: Adrian Firth)

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Obsessions Street Mural

Designer Stefan Sagmeister used 250,000 Euro-cent coins in three different shades to create this mural in Amsterdam’s Waagdragerhof Square. He chose the word “obsession” because he believes it’s a key component to the best works of art. (Photo: sagmeister.com)

andrew jackson

Andrew Jackson

Another contribution from painter Sean Diediker, this likeness of our seventh president was his most expensive collage to create, requiring more than $30,000 in $20 bills. While all of Diediker’s presidential portraits have sold, he won’t reveal for how much. (Photo: Sean Diediker)

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Coin Gun

Ted Stanke’s Obama vs. McCain mosaic featured earlier in this slideshow was the artist’s first foray into the world of money art. In the three years since, he has created a number of coin sculptures, including this handgun, made entirely from cut-up coins and epoxy. (Photo: Ted Stanke)

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Structural Dollar

Designer Stephen Doyle was commissioned to create this money sculpture for Wired magazine. Doyle has been making paper sculptures for over ten years, mainly as an escape from his full-time position as a partner in a New York graphic design firm. (Photo: Felt and Wire)