Twenty Hours

Notes

The floor. The German statutory minimum wage is €13.90 per hour from 1 January 2026, rising to €14.60 in 2027. It is the floor here because the gallery is in Germany, and because the artist also has to live. Sweden, where this work was made, has no statutory minimum wage at all: pay floors are set by roughly 700 collective agreements covering about 90 per cent of the workforce.

Where the forty hours come from. The eight-hour day and the forty-eight-hour week entered international law through the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, Part XIII, Article 427, and the first convention the International Labour Organization ever adopted. Forty came later, in the middle of the Great Depression: ILO Convention No. 47, the Forty-Hour Week Convention, adopted on 22 June 1935, not as a gift to workers but as a way of spreading scarce work across more of the unemployed. It did not enter into force until 1957, and as of 2023 fifteen states had ratified it.

And nobody in Europe actually works it. The average collectively agreed week in the EU was 38,1 hours in 2022. In 2025 employees reported usual hours of 36,6 a week, and the average actual week across all workers was 35,9. France legislates 35. Germany has no single statutory figure at all: the Arbeitszeitgesetz sets a daily maximum and the week is bargained sector by sector, from 35 in engineering to 39 elsewhere. Forty is the number everyone pictures when they say a full working week, and almost no European country puts it in law.

Which is why this form uses it. Line 9 is fixed at 2 080 hours for everyone, whatever was entered above. Work more and the excess is printed on line 10 and dropped. Work less and the full week is applied to you regardless. The denominator is an inherited round number that fits nobody's life, and it is doing exactly the job here that it does everywhere else. It is also twice twenty: what this work asks of you is half a recognised working week.

Why unpaid hours are counted. Across the OECD, women spend about four hours a day on unpaid household and care work, roughly twice as much as men. Globally the figure is 4 hours 25 minutes for women against 1 hour 23 minutes for men. The ILO estimates unpaid care and domestic work at around 9 per cent of global GDP, some 11 trillion US dollars, of which women's share is about 6.6 per cent and men's about 2.4 per cent. Counting those hours here does not make them worth less. It makes visible how many of them go unpaid.

After tax, not before. Lines 1 and 2 are what actually reached you, because that is the number people recognise about their own lives. It also means your contribution to everything we hold in common has already been made before this form asks you anything, and is not counted here as if it were yours to spend. The same happens at the other end. What you pay is taxed again, first as VAT and then on the artist's and the gallery's share of what is left, so the money that finally reaches either of us is an after-tax number too. Both ends of this are measured in hours that have already paid their part.

What the twenty hours are not. They are not an account of the labour in the work. That was months, and it was never only mine. Twenty hours is the unit of what comes next, and every buyer gives the same twenty hours of their own working life. Only the money between them differs, and that difference is the subject.

Nothing you enter is saved. This form calculates in your browser. No income, no hours, nothing you type is transmitted, stored or seen by anyone, including the artist. Nothing you enter leaves this page at all. Making an offer is a separate step, and the only thing that travels to it is the figure you decide to carry there. How you got there stays yours.

How the price is shared, and why it is printed here. Sale price, less VAT, less materials, and what remains is divided equally, fifty fifty, between the artist and the gallery. Both then pay income tax and social charges on their own share. That split is confirmed, not an assumption. Art Claims Impulse agreed to publish it, which almost no gallery does. It is printed because a work that asks you to disclose what you are paid, while concealing what the people selling it are paid, would be making the argument in one direction only. And half is not a toll. A gallery willing to take on an experiment like this one, and to put its own time into sharing the work and into keeping it sustainable, is part of what makes the work grow. Their half of the hours goes back into a working life that fosters art too.

Sources: BMAS · ILO C047 · Eurostat · Eurofound · OECD · UN Women / ILO