Edita Schubert: Profusion
Edita Schubert: Profusion, Muzeum Susch, Susch, December 13, 2025 – May 24, 2026
Edita Schubert (1947–2001) never showed “old work”: each exhibition in her lifetime presented new projects and research.(Leonida Kovač, in “Edita Schubert,” Trikultura, November 4, 2015. Video, 28:14. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JbylBV43t0) This poses a particular challenge to the curator of a survey exhibition or retrospective—how to remain practice-led and present an artist’s living histories, attentive to the conditions of production and display, in their absence? A series of rooms dedicated to Schubert’s studio practice are central to (if not first in) Profusion at Muzeum Susch, the artist’s first solo exhibition outside of the former Yugoslavia. By bringing the visitor into the heart of her practice, curator David Crowley gestures to her current place as an “artist’s artist,” better known and respected by her community than in the canons of art history or popular culture.
Edita Schubert with her artwork ‘Red Machine’, ca. 1983. Photo Marijan Susovski.
Doorway (Vrata) (1–12) (1978) is a painterly reconstruction of Schubert’s place of work in the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb, where she soon took a job as draftsperson after graduating in painting from the University’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1971, and where she remained employed until the end of her life. Each of the near-identical canvases takes the form of a life-size image of a door, distinguished only by variations in their soft pastel tones, and in the number plate on each door, which Schubert carefully traced in black acrylic paint. These doors hang on strings against the white walls of the gallery, creating the impression of an institution, or “sealed system” (zakopčani sustav).(Željko Kipke, “Kupole i katedrale,” Vijenac 564 (November 2015), www.matica.hr/vijenac, quoted in David Crowley, “Doors, Stairs, and Windows” in Edita Schubert: Profusion, ed. David Crowley (Hatje Cantz, 2026).)
Edita Schubert, Doorway, 1978. Installation view, Gallery SC, Zagreb, 1978. From the artist’s archive.
Crowley, however, uses this installation to open dialogues about the artist’s practice, which varies widely from early representational paintings, to experiments with performance, sculpture, and collage later in her career. Changes in Schubert’s approach, and use of medium and materials, were not linear. This logic is supported by the spiral infrastructure of the Muzeum itself, which subtly layers the rooms atop each other, encouraging the viewer to both move and think back and forth. There are no wall texts or labels in Profusion, and the interpretation is reduced to a concise guide; the accompanying publication, referenced many times in this review, offers a wealth of information for those who seek it out. The absence of text within the space allows Schubert’s enigmatic works to live in different ways, and encourages the viewer’s own interpretations and responses.
In the light of the exhibition space at Susch, the colors and semi-transparent structure of Doorway stage a speculative conversation—across space, and time—with Do Ho Suh’s sculptural and architectural reconstructions of his own homes. Both Schubert and Suh’s installations are iterative; at Susch, two corridors of indoor plants are placed within Doorway, as they were in the first exhibition of the work in 1978 at the Students’ Center Gallery (Galerija SC) in Zagreb. Nevertheless, this particular installation invokes new, site-specific conversations through the “living architecture” of the Muzeum, which is partially constructed from stones from the town’s River Inn, and irrigated by a constant stream flowing along the walls downstairs. Through the generous windows, Schubert’s workencounters the environments of Susch and, beyond the window, the Chasa d’Artists, which hosts residencies.
Profusion opens ten years after a vital retrospective at Klovićev Dvori Gallery in Zagreb, Croatia’s largest gallery institution. In the publication and press materials that accompany this current exhibition, Crowley often credits that retrospective, and its curator, Leonida Kovač, for making this survey possible. Kovač is an art historian, theorist, and curator who worked closely with Schubert, and has taken care of her archive and estate in the years since her untimely death in 2001. She remarks how, posthumously, Schubert has acquired a cult status amongst younger people, as an idea or “emotive figure,” more than a really-existing person. This suggests the importance of showing Schubert’s work in a completely new setting—creating an opportunity for the work to exist independently of the artist and her biography—and may also explain the decision to engage with a different curator beyond Kovač.(Crowley is the one of a number of guest curators and collaborators who are men, including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Marco Scotini, and Krzysztof Kosciuczuk, who is also the former Artistic Director of Muzeum Susch. The exhibition title is drawn from an assertion made by critic Ješa Denegri, in 1985.)
Kovač highlights the lack of “tradition” or motivation in Croatia to curate artists’ work in new contexts.(Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch ‘Edita Schubert: Why Dissect a Painterly Canvas?’,” Muzeum Susch, August 24, 2023. Video, 1:25:42.https://www.muzeumsusch.ch/en/2113/Leonida-Kovac-Why-Dissect-a-Painterly-Canvas.) This was also the case in Schubert’s lifetime. During the 1980s, her practice was often assimilated within wider artistic movements, primarily the popular neo-geometric conceptualism and abstraction practiced by the international Transavantgarde, but also the local Nova Slika (New Image), a term which encompassed many different artists in pursuit of more sensitive forms of expression through conventional media, including painting. This particular association is perpetuated by her inclusion in contemporary exhibitions such as Parallel Lines: High Modernism In Croatia 1949—1998 (2024-2025), drawn from the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb (NMMA), which opened at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (MNAC) almost exactly a year before Profusion. The interpretation at Muzeum Susch speaks directly of Croatia, more than Yugoslavia, though this an effort to situate Schubert in her particular Zagreb context, rather than to retrospectively impose a national identity on the artist or their practice.
Edita Schubert, Untitled (Cathedral), installation view at PM Gallery, Zagreb, 1987. From the artist’s archive.
Profusion is—like most of Muzeum Susch’s exhibitions—a solo presentation, and its dedication of time, space, and (financial) resources fully respects the breadth of Schubert’s practice. More generally, group exhibitions can obscure the singular nature and particular context of any artist’s work. This could certainly befall Schubert, who refused any single style or medium.
Moving through the twelve rooms of this exhibition—which, aside from the first, follow in loose chronological order—visitors might have the sense of meeting as many different artists.(David Crowley, in “Edita Schubert: Profusion,” Muzeum Susch, December 11, 2025. Video, 11:39. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MlgD81Psfk.) Next to the aforementioned installation, via another architectural work, Staircase (Stubište) (1978), a room devoted to Schubert’s serial works sheds light on one of her key artistic processes. Schubert often photocopied her initial drawings, paintings and photographs, discarding these sources or studies in the process, the copy thus becoming the “original” work of art. These works unsettle artistic conventions, and engage with contemporary questions about reproduction and technical reproducibility, prominent in Yugoslavia in the 1970s through the arrival of criticism influenced by Benjamin’s writings.(As Kovač suggests, “unfortunately, Walter Benjamin…only reached Europe via America, and America discovered him too late.” Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch: ‘Edita Schubert.’”)
One particularly exceptional work is From Sunrise to Sunset – Sun on the Chimney (Od izlaska do zalaska – Sunce na dimnjaku)(1977), comprising photocopies of eight found images of the structure atop the building neighbouring her studio, cast in different quantities of light and shadow. It is an engagement with conceptual art that is also, in its small scale and through the artist’s intervention by hand-coloring, intimate. The publication that accompanies the exhibition highlights how Schubert was not included in the international exhibition dedicated to Xerox art at the Students’ Center Gallery in 1973 —which predates both the landmark All Xerox (1976) and International Copy Art Exhibition (1980), curated and organized by Ginny Lloyd, in San Francisco—nor the corresponding issue of the photography magazine, Spot (1974). Perhaps this was due to her painterly, more than technological, relation with the medium, which brings her closer to her contemporaries in America, including Jack Whitten.(The dominant interpretations of Xerox artistic culture and practices are situated in – or mediated by – the capitalist and consumerist context of the United States. See Kayleigh Perkov, Charlotta Kotík and Kate Eichhorn, in Meghan Forbes, “Making Nothing out of Something: Multimedia Experiments,” in Edita Schubert: Profusion.)
Furthermore, unlike her contemporary conceptual artists in Yugoslavia, who worked more exclusively in medium or style, Schubert also directly referenced western/European painting traditions of the Renaissance and Old/Dutch Masters. More critically, she considered what was paradigmatic in their work, “analyzing them” for conceptual art.(Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch: ‘Edita Schubert.’”) In the series Nürnberg (From a Journey) (1977), for instance, presented opposite From Sunrise to Sunset, she directly photocopies her own photographs of Albrecht Dürer’s house in Germany. Through this series, Schubert explored his mark-making techniques, and studies of the human face—both themes that recur elsewhere in her practice.
Installation view of Edita Schubert: Profusion. © Muzeum Susch / Art Stations Foundation. Photograph by Federico Sette.
Yet it is the artist’s architectural interests that become obvious in this particular exhibition, in these particular spaces. One enclosed room is devoted to the cupola, a motif Schubert worked in various mediums including plaster sculpture, painting, stamped prints, photocopied drawings, and a card-index system used in mail art. In the accompanying publication, art historian Marko Ilić details how Schubert played with this architectural form, associated with power and religion, within the more secular socialist society of Yugoslavia.(Marko Ilić, “Edita Schubert: In the Midst of Significant Turmoil,” in Edita Schubert: Profusion.) A mixed media rendering of the Šišman Ibrahim Paša Madrasa in Počitelj, Bosnia—Schubert’s first cupola—is significant as one example of Islamic architecture in Yugoslavia, and the location of a formative artist residency. The motif could also be considered in relation to Schubert’s “emblematic” Untitled works (absent from this exhibition) for which she remains best known in Croatia, often given titles such as Cathedrals (1987).(Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch: ‘Edita Schubert.’”)
Where Kovač strongly emphasizes the artist’s engagement with western/European art, including religious iconography, Crowley reads her practice within the political biography of Yugoslavia.(Born to an Italian mother and German father in the region of Slavonia, Schubert’s identity and interests were closely related to cultural histories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.) The artist’s work, of course, eschews any such strict interpretive categories, and bears evidence of a great many points of contact. Beyond the aforementioned Masters, we can view the trapezium-shaped works Sarcophagus (Sarkofag) and Human (Čovjek) (both 1984) at the exhibition’s opening in relation to primitivism, and modernist appropriations of “African” masks and cultural objects, as much as the contemporary movement of High Modernism in Croatia. Strong colors can also be observed in Schubert’s nature-based works like 100 Roses (100 ruža) (1979), a installation on the floor that forces the viewer to kneel. On closer inspection, it can be speculated that the artist appropriates the reds and greens worn by Giorgione’s Castelfranco Madonna (c. 1504), an artist who was vital in her studio practice, and whose work was ever-present in a postcard on wall.(Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch: ‘Edita Schubert.’”)
100 Roses is presented alongside a series of works which also include bound branches, and materials like bone and ash. The exhibition offers these works in relation to “protective circles from Slavic mythology,” which, perhaps paradoxically, reinforces how Schubert was able to use quite everyday objects in performative ways to reverse or return the gaze. For example, photographs that accompany the “crown-like formation of staves” from Schubert’s torch ritual at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival in 1981 also serve as a reminder of the expectations of the onlooking tourists in Yugoslavia.
Installation view of Edita Schubert: Profusion. © Muzeum Susch / Art Stations Foundation. Photograph by Federico Sette.
In the following room, Schubert’s first collages with newspaper, produced from 1990 in response to the outbreak of the civil wars in Yugoslavia, could be read in premonition of the Croatian tabloid denouncement of the five “witches”, feminists who “rape[d] Croatia” by talking about press censorship to international human rights monitors.(Meredith Tax, “Five Women Who Won’t Be Silenced,” The Nation, May 10, 1993, https://www.dubravkaugresic.com/writings/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Five-Women-That-Wont-Be-Silenced.pdf.) It is notable that though Schubert remained in Zagreb through the 1990s, and continued to practice, she endured a sort of pre-posthumous decline in public awareness, even following her participation in the international biennials in Venice and Sydney.
It is here—later in her career—that Profusion actually begins, with a number of bitumen and wax crayon works executed following her co-representation of Yugoslavia at Venice in 1982. This is a fitting introduction to Schubert’s practice, as one peak in the artist’s career, and representative of her self-perception as a painter first and foremost. Kovač suggests her practice was one of probing into the “anatomy of painting,” as evident in the red and blue colorway which bleeds through her works.(Leonida Kovač, in Elise Morton, “‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush,” The Guardian, December 19, 2025, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/dec/19/i-had-to-plunge-the-knife-into-the-canvas-edita-schubert-wielded-her-scalpel-like-other-artists-wield-a-brush.) This is a reminder that Schubert’s work cannot be separated from her “day job” as a draftsperson of anatomical drawings, nor the body itself. Indeed, it has been her use of the surgical cut in canvas painting, performance and photography that has, most recently, attracted the most attention within the artist’s practice.(Schubert published illustrations for texts including Jelena Krmpotić Nemanić, Wolfgang Draf, and Jan Helms’ Surgical Anatomy of Head and Neck (1985), a textbook used by medical students across Europe and the US. See Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch: ‘Edita Schubert.’” Bojana Pejić, by contrast, finds “nothing ‘medical’” in Schubert’s early sculptures. See Pejić, “The Canvas, the Body, and the Surgical Cut,” in Edita Schubert: Profusion.)
In the exhibition catalogue for Monuments Should Not Be Trusted, curated by Lina Džuverović at Nottingham Contemporary in 2016, Crowley contributed an essay about GEFF 69 in Zagreb, a festival which promoted “sexuality as a way to a new humanism’” including artists like Katalin Ladik and Carolee Schneeman. Likely one reason the “outsider” Schubert has been obscured from (already scant) histories of women’s art and performance is that she did not meet the art world’s patriarchal standards of feminist and sexual performance art, then and still promoted—and perhaps expected—of women artists in Yugoslavia.
Edita Schubert, Untitled (Torches), 1981. Performance, Dubrovnik, 1981. Photo by Marijan Susovski.
Profusion arrives after the restaging of Marina Abramović’s Balkan Erotic Epic in Manchester in 2025.(Abramović is one of Schubert’s contemporaries and a fellow student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, with whom she is contextualised in the exhibition’s press materials.) Where Abramović begins with and returns to herself, Schubert only considered her autobiography in her final works. Her specific performative practice, as related in the aforementioned Torches (1981), is thus one of looking at our selves, at others, and deeper. From Profusion, the visitor might reconsider Sanja Iveković’s Personal Cuts (1982), which was filmed and aired just five years after Schubert’s experiments with the perforated canvas. Schubert’s works across mediums show a number of her body parts in defiance of ocularcentrism in conceptual art—and also, a gendered gaze.(Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch: ‘Edita Schubert.’”)
Obvious—yet overlooked, in all but Maja Fowkes’ essay for the publication(Maja Fowkes, “Edita Schubert’s Counterintuitive Analytics of Nature,” in Edita Schubert: Profusion.)—are the ecological implications of Schubert’s approach to medium. Long before the Venice Biennale, the artist experimented with bitumen in more sculptural works, including a bark-stripped, black-tarred tree, installed outside as part of the aforementioned exhibition at Galerija SC in 1979.(Tree (Dvor) (1979) is one of many works in the vicinity of the exhibition that relates to the practice of Joseph Beuys (1921-1986). See also Marina Abramović and Biljana Tomić-Denegri in conversation with Marika Kuźmicz, “The Former Yugoslavia: An Art Scene Animated by Women,” Muzeum Susch #5 (2023): 6-13; Piotr Uklański’s Real Nazis (2017).) Also absent from this particular exhibition is Human from the Bird’s Eye View (1984), a small sculpture of bent branches also coated with bitumen—though eagle-eyed viewers will find its photocopied image in the installation Biography (Biografija) (1997–1998), at the exhibition’s close.
These “nature-oriented” works are interesting both of themselves, and in relation to such issues of social hierarchies, including gender. Indeed, Schubert’s understanding of the “non-human” seems less related to the “other-than-human” discourse that now permeates much contemporary art and criticism, and more concerned with the existence of borders, and forms of classification and categorization.(Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch: ‘Edita Schubert.’”) Interspersed throughout the exhibition are a number of works that reflect the artist’s interest in natural sciences, as order. Herbarium (1977), for example, a series of “drawings” with twigs and medical tape, proposes a different, non-hierarchical taxonomy of plants—an alternative to the hierarchy proposed by the human study of natural sciences.
Marika Kuźmicz, curator at Muzeum Susch, suggests this “purposefully naïve” series was produced in an effort “to lose” her conventional art education.(Some art historical elements persist, such as the figure of Medusa, representing the power of nature and women, who also appears elsewhere in her practice.) As a student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, Schubert had worked out of the patriarchal, sexist, and misogynistic discourses perpetuated by the likes of artist and professor Ljubo Babić from the interwar period. In defiance of the obligation to draw nudes, notoriously, Schubert set to work on a series of water plumbing pipes and electrical plugs, a story retold no more passionately than by the artist herself.(Leonida Kovač, “Instituto Susch: ‘Edita Schubert,’” and Lina Džuverović, “Necklaces, Hairpins, and Swimming Costumes: Edita Schubert’s Early Pop Experiments,” in Edita Schubert: Profusion.) Thinking with Katalin Ladik’s Genesis (1975), these works reflect the artist’s technical and technological ability, but also the mechanical nature of the body. These networks can be observed in some of the bitumen paintings like Face (Lice), Nuclear Power Station (Nuklearna elektrana), and Red Machine (Crena mašina) (all 1983). Schubert’s confrontation of gendered expectations also came in more subtle forms: in the case of Red Machine, she opts for the feminine term in the original language title, which is often used for domestic appliances such as washing machines.
Edita Schubert, Detail of Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, 1977.
Cycles in Schubert’s work—of the machine, of life, and of series—also function as undercurrents in this exhibition, moving the viewer through and towards its conclusion. The exhibition closes with Horizons (2000), a series of rings of black-and-white photocopies of photographs from places to which Schubert felt a strong connection. Suspended at eye-level, they are an invitation to enter the artist’s lived experiences. Her various artistic pilgrimages are also, in a sense, re-performed through Profusion, in the viewer’s journey to the remote location of Susch.
At a time when museums and galleries have become places for entertainment, a sustained institutional commitment to the research and representation of women artists is all the more important. It is encouraging that Kovač is acknowledged not only for her support for the exhibition, and care for the artist’s estate, but for creating the “conditions necessary for curators and scholars to study Edita Schubert’s work.” This resists the tendency of “keeping” works in institutional collections, or simply leaving them to disappear into obscurity. It is such generous and generative work that has ensured the potential for living surveys, as well as retrospectives, of artistswho are no longer present. As Profusion positions Schubert as an artist’s artist, it also suggests Kovač as the “curator’s curator,” both women being well-known in their regionally-specific artistic and cultural circles, but less recognized in wider networks.
Muzeum Susch holds out many possibilities, here, that artistic exhibitions grounded in research are possible, without dependence on archival material. Nor do their monographic exhibitions rely on contemporary artistic commissions to suggest an artist’s relevance today. The institution simply offers its space for publics to create personal connections with an artist’s work, and prompts us to look out— whom else may we be missing for similar reasons?
Both the exhibition and the institution are models for how curatorial work can both recover and—more positively—work from what is lacking. This approach serves as a starting point for more critical and speculative inquiry.
