A German museum employee was recently arrested for reportedly swapping several paintings with fake copies and selling the originals to fund a lavish lifestyle.

Due to Germany’s strict privacy laws, the identity of the 30-year-old former employee of the Deutsches Museum in Munich has not been disclosed to the public, but it has been reported that he admitted to replacing at least four paintings with copies in the period that he worked there (2016 – 2018). He allegedly sold the works of art at several auctions, using the money to pay off debts and then buy luxury goods, including a Rolls-Royce and expensive wristwatches. The auction house involved in the sale of three of the stolen paintings said that it “simply wasn’t possible to identify them as stolen property,” adding that it collaborated with authorities during the investigation.

“The defendant shamelessly exploited the opportunity to access the storage rooms … and sold valuable cultural assets in order to secure a high standard of living for himself and to show off,” the court heard from prosecutors.

The unnamed museum employee stole “Das Märchen vom Froschkönig” (The Tale of the Frog Prince) by Franz von Stuck, replaced it with a fake, and put the original up for auction. he told the auction house that the artwork had belonged to his grandparents or great-grandparents, and managed to earn almost 50,000 euros ($52,000) in cash, after the auction fees were deducted.

He subsequently swapped “Die Weinprüfung” (The Wine Test) by Eduard von Grützner and “Zwei Mädchen beim Holzsammeln im Gebirge” (Two Girls Collecting Wood in the Mountains) by Franz von Defregger and sold them at the same auction house, earning tens of thousands of euros. He also stole “Dirndl” by Franz von Defregger, and tried selling it through a different Munich auction house, but it did not sell.

In the end, the 30-year-old man managed to avoid prison time, but was handed a 21-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay back the museum more than $64,000. In its ruling, the court argued that it had taken into account the man’s confession and the fact that he showed ‘genuine remorse’.

“He said he acted without thinking,” the court ruling read. “He can no longer explain his behavior today.”

The employee’s thefts were discovered when a provenance researcher noticed that Das Märchen vom Froschkönig was “quite a clumsy copy,” despite being in the right frame, which suggested that someone had swapped it with a copy. Further investigation of the museum’s storage depots resulted in the discovery of the three other missing paintings.

“Our staff are all very reliable, but there is not much you can do if one employee harbors criminal energy. He had no previous record and there was no way of knowing he was capable of this when we hired him,” a spokesperson for the Deutsches Museum said.

Danish artist Jens Haaning has been ordered to repay the Kunsten Museum in Aalborg 532,000 kroner ($76,000) after handing in two blank canvases as artworks in a project he named ‘Take the Money and Run’.

In 2021, Jens Haaning, a Danish conceptual artist whose work focuses on power and inequality, was commissioned by the Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in Aalborg to recreate two of his earlier artworks for which he had used a bunch of banknotes to represent the average income in Denmark and Austria. The artist agreed and the museum provided about 532,000 kroner ($76,000) for him to recreate the art pieces, including a fee of 40,000 kroner. Only when the museum staff unpacked the two artworks from Haaning, they found two blank canvases titled ‘Take the Money and Run’.

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Nguyen Thi Thu is one of the few remaining artists practicing and constantly enhancing the traditional Vietnamese art of sculpting realistic-looking flowers out of papaya fruits.

Thu became enamored with carving various flowers from papaya fruits at the age of 15, when, like many other parents during the 1980s, her family registered her for an exclusive class on the art of sculpting the tropical fruit. She was fascinated by the traditional art form, but then she had to move to Russia for 15 years, where, because she was too busy working and had no access to green papayas, she couldn’t practice her favorite art form. She tried it with all sorts of other fruits and vegetables, including watermelons, but nothing was quite like the papaya she knew. When she went back to Hanoi in 2009, she immediately got back into papaya sculpting, and she has been practicing the craft ever since.

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German artist Werner Härtl has carved out a truly unique niche for himself – he is currently the only known artist who uses diluted cow dung to create sepia-style paintings.

Here at Oddity Central, we’ve featured some funky art mediums in the past, from the artist’s own blood as paint, to dead cockroaches as canvases for tiny paintings, but in terms of weirdness, few things come close to Werner Härtl’s chosen medium. The German artist started experimenting with cow dung in 2012, during a stint as an agricultural worker. He packed some manure into a canister and used water to dilute it in order to obtain different sepia tones. These days, he prefers to get the ‘paint’ directly from the source, placing the canister just under the cow’s rectum as it poops. He claims that harvesting just two bovine bowel movements provides him with enough material for at least half a year.

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Located alongside a motorway outside of Melbourne, in Australia’s Victoria state, lies Hotel EastLink. At least what looks like a high-rise hotel, because in reality, it’s just an unusual sculpture.

Designed by local artist Callum Morton, the Hotel EastLink was unveiled in 2007, and it has been confusing motorists ever since. It’s not as large as a high-rise hotel –  20 meters tall, 12m wide, and 5m thick – but driving past it at high speed for the first time, it’s really hard to tell, so it’s no wonder that people actually look it up online and actually call in for reservations. To make it even more confusing, at night, some of the windows are lit up, which makes it seem like some of the rooms are occupied. But there are no rooms, and the building itself can’t be entered, because the whole thing is a sculpture designed purely for ornamental purposes.

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Julia Popova, a talented soap maker based in Sankt Petersburg, Russia, creates amazingly detailed bars of soap that look like delectable desserts, liquor bottles or juicy fruits.

Nine years ago, when Julia started making her beautiful soap bars, she only made them as gifts for family and friends, but she received such positive feedback that she actually started showing them off on social media. And soon, orders started coming in and the OmNon Soap brand was born. In the beginning, she would buy regular soap bars, melt them, and them mold them into the desired shapes, but as she became more involved in the artistic process, she started buying the base ingredients and then making her own soap. Well, calling it soap doesn’t do it justice, as every one of her creations is more like a piece of art.

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Talented Nigerian artist Patrick Onyekwere creates stunning, emotionally-charged portraits that look more like photographs than ballpoint pen drawings.

Living and working in Lagos, Nigeria, Patrick Onyekwere started drawing professionally in 2015 and has since become one of the world’s leading ballpoint pen drawing masters. A fan of Kelvin Okafor, himself an accomplished hyperrealist artist specializing in pencil portraits, Onyekwere is able to capture and convey the emotions and feelings of his models like no one else. He actually has an entire selection process that starts with inviting subjects to talk about their lives and their culture, before taking a few snapshots of them for reference.

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Calgary-based sculptor Jeff de Boer has made a career out of creating intricate metal suits of armor for cats and mice.

“It all started with a mouse,” Jeff de Boer recalls. He was looking for a creative way to combine his longtime passion for medieval armor with his trade as a jeweler and one day it simply dawned on him – he could make a tiny suit of armor for a mouse. It seemed like an interesting idea at the time, but he had no idea he would go on to become known as the world’s first and only animal armorer and create over 500 suits of armor for mice and cats.

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Sandry Riffard is a talented tattoo artist from France who specializes in macabre hyperrealism with a three-dimensional layer.

We’ve featured some amazing tattoo art over the last 15 years, from titans of the trade like Arlo DiCristina and Karol Rybakowski, to talented newcomers carving out their own niches, like Eduardo “Duda” Lozano or Mexican artist Yatzil Elizalde, but when it comes to hyperrealistic macabre tattoos, it’s tough finding someone better. The French artist has always had a thing for horror-inspired art, but he has come so far in the last few years, setting himself apart from other practitioners of the style with some incredible projects.

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UK-born artist Jonny Hall is famous for being one of the first tattoo artists to introduce UV-reactive ink to the style of black-and-grey realism.

UVealism, a term coined by Hall himself, basically refers to the enhancement of already-impressive black-and-grey realist tattoos with the ethereal glow of UV-reactive ink. In plain light, UV tattoos are semi-invisible, but put them under an ultraviolet black-light bulb and you get to see a whole new dimension of the design. UV-reactive ink is a bit more difficult to work with than normal tattoo ink, because it’s a lot thinner, but when used correctly, the results are awe-inspiring.

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Ethiopian-born artist Natnael Mekuria specializes in stunning celebrity portraits cracked into panes of glass using only a chisel and hammer.

22-year-old Natnael Mekuria discovered cracked glass art during the Covid-19 pandemic, but mastering the unusual art form took a lot of time and patience. In the beginning, he lacked the hand control necessary to keep the glass canvas from shattering, so he would spend hours chiseling at it only to have it break into pieces before finishing. But he didn’t give up, and today he is able to turn simple panes of laminated glass into beautiful works of art. He still spends hours on end painstakingly chiseling at the glass, but the end results are much different than when he first started.

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Nigerian artist Alex Peter Idoko uses fire, razorblades and sandpaper to create stunningly-realistic portraits that look more like sepia-toned photos.

Pyrography, or painting with fire, is an intriguing art form that involves the decoration of a wooden canvas with burn marks resulting from a controlled flame or heated instrument, like a poker. It’s a less forgiving art than traditional painting, as mistakes are much harder to fix or hide due to the destructive nature of fire. However, some artists control the unusual medium so well that they can create photo-quality artworks that are almost indistinguishable to the naked eye.

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Wild Drawing is a talented street artist who specializes in stunning 3D murals that turn transform bland structures into works of art.

Born in Bali, Wild Drawing, or WD for short, first got into street art in the year 2000 during his studies at the School of Fine Arts. He and his colleagues were often protesting school policies with large, intricate banners, and that made him realize that large images visible in the public space can have a big impact on society. A few years back, WD moved to Greece and he has been unleashing his artistic talent on the streets of Athens ever since. Drawing inspiration from nature, art, social phenomena, and even politics, Wild Drawings creates colorful compositions that always catch the eyes of passers-by.

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Ruben Jordan Langsted is a talented tattoo artist who specializes in photo-realistic black & grey tattoos with high contrast and soft shadows.

Born in Norway but currently working out of the Dropout Collective tattoo shop in Copenhagen, Denmark Ruben Jordan Langsted is regarded as one of the world’s best tattooers when it comes to realistic black & grey tattoos. He claims that he only does this style of tattoo simply because he’s “not good at anything else,” but according to other sources, he does it because it is such a technically demanding style that no matter how good you get, there is always room for improvement. Looking at some of his black & grey artworks inspired by classic sculptures and artistic interior design, it’s hard to believe he could do any better.

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Latvian artist Marite Desaine specializes in beautiful ballpoint pen drawings that can easily be mistaken for elaborate paintings.

In the right hands, the humble ballpoint pen can be an amazing art tool, and we have featured some pretty amazing ballpoint drawings in the past, but nothing quite like the artworks of Marite Desaine. The Latvian artist first took the internet by storm with her awe-inspiring drawings back in 2014, soon after graduating from art school, when a number of prestigious art websites and blogs picked up her work. And for good reason, her style was unique, and the artworks – mostly landscapes – looked more like colorful paintings than drawings.

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