Danica Phelps

 December 2011. See the entire magazine online here

Galerie Hubert Winter, Vienna

1 July – 10 September

By John Quin

Cross over the tram tracks of Breite Gasse and you see through the gallery windows that the white walls are covered by a splurge of scary bright reds. Has Vienna’s Hermann Nitsch, that captain of scarlet, the cardinal of giblet evisceration himself, influenced the new show at Hubert Winter? The visceral rawness of Danica Phelps’s The Cost of Love (2011) relates to emotion and loss, though, rather than surgical excess.

Five of the 25 panels of this work are on display. They feature the American artist’s trademark stripes – various reds for financial loss, groups of green for gain. This is no verdant valley of plenty. In 2009 Phelps lost her Brooklyn pad to the bank after a relationship breakdown – seeing red, madder red, this work is a screw-you gesture of beetroot-faced pique, more Marnie than Carrie, you might say. The text of the Housing Court decision contains 13,364 letters, which works out at a loss for her of $26 per letter. Each word of the missive is cut up and affixed amidst the stripes. Each letter of each word has its equivalent as a stripe done in different hues of red. As an extension Phelps has cannily invented Stripe Book (2010–11), the idea being that you buy some stripes for €60. She then signs your name and address on a new version, adding another sequence of green stripes which then retail for €120, und so weiter. A snip, then, if you get in early as a collector, a neat map of art commodity as economic exchange if you are late to the party. Somehow it doesn’t come as a surprise to learn that the artist’s mother is a mathematician.

Phelps’s show has artistic as well as financial balance. Her view on life has a divergent strabismus – there’s the salty revenge mentioned above and the sweet results of her passion in the drawings of her baby boy. In the back room is a selection of these accomplished drawings. Acknowledging Egon Schiele’s influence and brisk line, she renders her child napping in Orion Sleeping (2011). Such putto posturing though is, one suspects, divisive and likely to provoke predictable ‘gee how cute’ simpering in some and emesis in others. Impressively, with Hands (2009) she captures the wee fella’s delicate mitts while simultaneously Abreastfeeding him, a neat trick. Earlier work, such as A Book of D’s (2005), also on show, confirms that Phelps has the tenderness of a Jeanne Mammen when drawing her nights with her ex-partner Debi. At their best these have the fraught intensity of Kitaj, but occasionally they recall the gaucheries that  Chris Foss delivered for The Joy of Sex in 1972 (albeit without the beardy bloke). There’s a brave Eminesque flavour to exposing such personal data, but Phelps possesses more conceptual  rigour and skill as a draughtswoman than  Dame Tracey.

Less challenging, though, is her videowork Pregnancy (2008), a time-lapse sequence of her rapidly expanding state of gravidity that seems more suited to an antenatal class or public- broadcasting sex education than the white cube. No, Phelps’s talents are more suited to the pencil, particularly related to drawing in real time. Looking at Schiele, she herself has felt – as has been written on the Austrian artist – ‘his line listening as it moves across the page… listening to the world as it shapes itself on the page’. Her own line has some of this acoustic acuity. The Austrians of the old empire used to talk about fortwursteln in Count Taaffe’s day, a slang word that meant ‘keep slogging on’. One imagines Phelps patiently pressing ahead, documenting her life with the drawings and stripes, wakening to find one day that everything’s gone green.