«Monopoly Dreams»

Monopoly started as a warning. In 1904 Lizzie Magie patented The Landlord's Game, a board game built to show how landlords get rich while everyone else pays rent. Thirty years later it came back as Monopoly, and the warning turned into a fantasy. Players stopped learning how greed works and started enjoying it. Most monopoly wall art today keeps the fantasy and forgets the warning.

That flip is the starting point of this painting.

A young woman stands against a black wall where dollar bills fall like confetti. Her arms and shoulders are covered in cartoon money tattoos: Mr. Monopoly with his top hat and cash bags, Richie Rich near her collarbone, Scrooge McDuck at the bottom edge. She wears a necklace of heart-shaped stones, rings on almost every finger, a bitcoin on one nail. All of it is painted cleanly and carefully.

Her face is not. It is cut into strips that slip sideways, like a video call freezing, and black bars sit across her eyes and mouth. The things she owns are perfectly in focus. She is the part that breaks.

Artists have been circling money for a long time. Warhol painted rows of dollar bills in 1962 and came back to the dollar sign in 1981. J.S.G. Boggs drew banknotes by hand and spent them, and ended up in a London courtroom in 1987 because of it. I wanted to carry that conversation into contemporary pop art, into the age of influencers, crypto and filters, where the image of wealth matters more than the money itself.

The red, yellow, green and purple blocks on the left are a quiet nod to Mondrian. I like how a strict hundred-year-old grid looks next to a sleeve of cartoon tattoos.

This is the original pop art painting from my series The Artists Are Silent: one canvas, 120 × 90 cm, painted by hand, with every layer of paint. It's statement wall art in the full sense. The canvas is already sold, but I can paint Monopoly Dreams to order in any size. If you'd like this monopoly wall art at a smaller size, there is a hand-finished lithograph. To order an original, message me on Instagram or by email.