→ UPCOMING
EXHIBITION

Edita Schubert: 

Profusion

Curated by 

David Crowley

opening: December 13, 2025

I had to plunge knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something, with my brush, what’s more. 

I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.

Edita Schubert, 2000

Edita Schubert: Profusion at Muzeum Susch presents a comprehensive survey of Schubert’s art, from her early paintings to the installations that marked the final phase of her career.

Edita Schubert was an exceptionally prolific and inventive artist, active from the early 1970s until her untimely death in 2001. A significant figure in Croatian and Yugoslav art, she exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Biennale of Sydney (both 1982), and in galleries across Austria and the US, as well as frequently throughout Yugoslavia. Yet today, her art remains relatively little known. In December 2025, Muzeum Susch will present the first major retrospective of her work outside Croatia.

Schubert’s oeuvre is strikingly diverse, ranging from pioneering explorations of the human relations with the natural world in the 1970s to bold paintings in the spirit of the trans-avant-garde in the 1980s and collages reflecting on the brutality of war in the 1990s. Writing in 1985, art critic Ješa Denegri placed her at the forefront of a new direction in Yugoslav art following the austere aesthetics of 1970s conceptualism; in his words, she offered a “practice of profusion.”

The breadth of her artistic output—sculpture, painting, performance, installation—seems to anticipate the ‘post-medium’ condition of contemporary art. Yet when viewed together, strong lines of connection and continuity emerge across genres and media, often of an intimate kind.

Self-portraiture appears throughout the exhibition, though not always in conventional form. A painting of a doorway or stairway may be a meditation on her life as an artist. Her later works—self-portraits of various kinds—offer profound reflections on memory, identity, and mortality.

Occupying twelve galleries at the Muzeum, the exhibition will revisit Schubert’s own installation practices such as the Doorways first installed at Galerija SC in Zagreb (1978) and Horizon, her final installation presented at Križić Roban Gallery, Zagreb (2000) in which visitors were invited to step into her memories of place through photographic panoramas.

This exhibition is part of Muzeum Susch’s ongoing commitment to researching and exhibiting the work of women artists from Central and Eastern Europe, seeking to piece together a more complete and inclusive history of modern and contemporary art. It will be accompanied by a major book co-published with Hatje Cantz, featuring newly commissioned essays by leading writers including Lina Džuverović, Meghan Forbes, Maja Fowkes, Marko Ilić, Klara Kemp-Welch, Marika Kuźmicz, and Bojana Pejić, along with a key text by Schubert’s most expert interpreter, art historian Leonida Kovač.

Edita Schubert was born in 1947 in Virovitica, Croatia. She graduated in 1971 at the Fine Arts Academy in Zagreb (class of Miljenko Stančić). From 1972 to 2001 she worked as a sketch artist at the Chair of Anatomy and Clinical Anatomy of the University of Zagreb School of Medicine. At first, her work was hyperrealist, then she created installations with a magical tension in humble materials (leaves, fabric, sand) which she combined with painted surfaces. During the 1980s her work was connected with several trends, primarily the transavant-guarde, that is, its local version called Nova Slika. By the end of the 1980s, she painted compositions of intense colors in the spirit of New Geometry, and in trying to combine the individual level of reality with the wider context, she started working on ambiental installations. In the early days of her activity, by the end of the 1970s, she started working in the media of photography. She had individual exhibitions on international exhibitions of contemporary art such as the Biennale of Sydney and the Biennale of Venice (1982). Died in 2001 in Zagreb.

David Crowley is a Dublin-based historian and curator with a long-standing interest in the modern art of Central and Eastern Europe. He has curated various exhibitions including Cold War Modern at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in 2008–9 (co-curated with Jane Pavitt); Sounding the Body Electric. Experimental Art and Music in Eastern Europe at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2012 and Calvert 22, London, 2013 and Notes from the Underground. Music and Alternative Art in Eastern Europe, 1968-1994 at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, 2017 and Akademie Der Künste in Berlin in 2018 (both co-curated with Daniel Muzyczuk). His exhibition Henryk Stażewski: Late Style was presented at Muzeum Sztuki, Łódź, in 2023.

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