Galerie Hubert Winter

Danica Phelps (2)
Renate Wiehager — In: Minimalism and Applied I, Sammlung Chrysler, Berlin. 2008

Danica Phelps's subtle graphic work developed essentially in an analysis of American Post-Minimalism, which combined the reductionist, serial vocabulary of Minimal Art with conceptual strategies and an individual 'charge' for the material. The work of artists like Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Richard Tuttle and Hanna Wilke reflects the principle of 'Anti-Form'. They stress the activity of production itself and the reception process. These requirements are linked in Phelps's work with an everyday contemporary background: her monochrome or colored bar codes cover the most intimate and the most banal biographical events, like a diary.
The two-part drawing Home Equity Loan and What I Really Spent It On, 2007, is the last section of a three-part work series in the context of buying a house with artist's studio in Brooklyn. All three parts are flanked by architectural drawings. The first work in the group, a narrow, tall red panel, took paying the deposit for the house ($250,000) as its subject in 2006. The second work, consisting of two grey monochrome panels, was a visual representation of the mortgage she took out on the house ($625,000). A tiny bar, grey in this case, symbolizes a dollar in Phelps's system, so several assistants had to be taken on to produce the work, which was made up of 625,000 bars. Phelps depicted the production expenses and the profit resulting from the sale of the work on a fourth, accompanying panel, with green standing for profit and red for loss, the latter deriving from productions costs and the gallery's cut.
The work in the DaimlerChrysler Collection, Home Equity Loan and What I Really Spent It On, records on two panels an additional loan that Phelps was entitled to from the state as a first-time buyer. This loan is represented at the bottom edge of the grey panel: "home equity loan $ 145.000 July 2006", and the loan is noted at the bottom of the red panel: "what I really spent the home equity loan on (...) including some of what I was supposed to." Both panels show 145.000 bars, corresponding with the loan. As the loan can be seen neither as a profit or a loss in Phelp's system, the left-hand panel works in shades of grey. The red, right-hand panel uses red bars to indicate the appropriate use of the money, for repairs or renovation, but also payments that had nothing to do with the house, like day-to-day bills, which are captured in light orange, as if the artist would like to eliminate this element from the system. Together, the three parts of the work series are Danica Phelps's most extensive project to date.