5 millones de marcos sobreimpresos [5 Million Overprinted Marks] (2015)
Silkscreen on 250 original 20,000 German mark banknotes
Variable dimensions
BA Collection
Inventory No.: 2015.322
As part of his ‘Entropie’ [Entropy] project, Roberto Aguirrezabala reconstructs the aesthetic mindsets of the radical political movements in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. He thus gathered original historical items and worked on them. In this case, they are 250 20,000 Deutsche mark banknotes issued on 20 February 1923. During the devaluation process of the Deutsche mark that the Weimar Republic suffered as the result of the war reparations required by the Treaty of Versailles, it was common practice to overprint the banknotes to adjust their face value to the rate of hyperinflation. Aguirrezabala here appropriates this strategy and uses it for his own aesthetic purposes.