A Danish artist has been ordered to pay back a museum after it loaned him banknotes worth tens of thousands of pounds for an exhibition he called Take The Money And Run.

Jens Haaning, who exhibited blank canvasses, had been expected to recreate artworks from earlier in his career, in which he used banknotes to represent the average annual salary in Denmark and Austria.

The Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg, Denmark, gave him roughly 532,000 krone (£61,500) to put the installation together.

A Copenhagen court on Monday ordered Haaning to return the museum’s cash – but struck off 40,000 krone (£4,629) as an artist’s fee.

This is likely because the museum decided to display the blank canvasses alongside the works of other contemporary artists until January 2022, when Haaning was expected to return the funds.

The museum brought a civil lawsuit against the artist when he refused to give the money back, breaching the contract he had signed.

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Haaning has been given 14 days to pay the museum back – but the 58-year-old told Denmark’s dr.dk that he does not have the funds to do so.

He admitted the stunt had been “good for my work” but added: “It also puts me in an unmanageable situation where I don’t really know what to do.”

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The artist has four weeks to appeal the decision – but told dr.dk he does not intend to take the case further.

Lasse Andersson, director of the Kunsten Museum, said: “We will now carefully examine it [the ruling]. There is a four-week period for appeal, and as long as the case can still be appealed, we have no further comments.”

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