Without money we'd all be rich.

Mikael Colombu is a French artist based between Brussels and Paris. Since 2021, his practice has built a sustained inquiry into the iconography of money: the visual systems that have carried the weight of national identity, political authority, and collective faith across several centuries of paper currency.

He works in acrylic on canvas and with actual government-issued currency as material. The Ten MOEs (Means of Exchange) is a series of paintings treating ten world currencies as portrait subjects, each given its own palette, its own formal logic, its own emotional register. Art of Currency works directly with bills as substrate and argument, building paintings, diagrams, and text works from the physical object of money itself. The work ranges from quiet and monochromatic to loud and confrontational, but holds a consistent position throughout: the images that represent value deserve the same serious attention as the things they claim to represent.

The practice entered public life through Old Money, A Premature Monument to Paper Currency, a body of work that placed close to 15,000 unique pieces in the hands of collectors across the world. The community that formed around it has remained genuinely engaged beyond the moment of acquisition. In 2024 and 2025, a group of collectors organized as The Ruggenheim brought the work into physical exhibition, producing two consecutive presentations at DC Arts Center in Washington D.C. that drew substantial audiences and brought together large-scale works from the Old Money corpus alongside original paintings and currency-based pieces.

Before the studio, Colombu spent years as an art director in advertising and as a filmmaker in music, directing animated music videos for The Weeknd, Drake, CeeLo Green, and others. Those years gave him a working knowledge of how images are manufactured to sell things. That knowledge runs through everything he now makes.