Edita Schubert: Profusion

This book is the first major study of Edita Schubert‘s art published outside Croatia. Edita Schubert‘s body of work is strikingly diverse, spanning pioneering explorations of natural ecology in the 1970s to bold paintings in the spirit of the transavantgarde in the 1980s. She also created performance art on the streets of Dubrovnik and created installations that invited viewers into her world. Her later works—self-portraits of various kinds—offer profound meditations on memory, identity, and mortal- ity. Working in her studio in the Institute of Anatomy in Zagreb, she once compared her art with the practice of dissection, a precise and purposeful science which reveals the hidden territories of the human body. Often her subject was herself. The breadth of her artistic output seems to anticipate the “post-medium” condition of contemporary art. Yet when viewed together, strong lines of connection and continuity emerge, revealing a deeply intimate and single-minded vision of art. Edita Schubert (1947–2001) was an exceptionally prolific and inventive artist, active from the early 1970s until her untimely death at the age of 54 in 2001. A significant figure in Croatian and Yugoslav art, she exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Biennale of Sydney and in galleries in Austria and the US, as well as frequently throughout Yugoslavia. Yet today, her art remains relatively little known.