Crowley Edita Schubert: Profusion

1. Auflage 2025
ISBN: 978-3-7757-6154-3
Verlag: Hatje Cantz Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 200 Seiten

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.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Crowley, David

Weitere Mitwirkende

Crowley, David

Kovac, Leonida

Kuzmicz, Marika

Schubert, Edita

Pridgar, Harald

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Malerei: Gemälde
• Sozialwissenschaften Psychologie Allgemeine Psychologie Differentielle Psychologie, Persönlichkeitspsychologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstformen, Kunsthandwerk Installations-, Aktions-, Computer- und Videokunst
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Ausstellungskataloge, Museumsführer
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunst, allgemein Einzelne Künstler: Biographien, Monografien
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Künstlerische Stoffe, Motive, Themen Portraitdarstellung in der Kunst
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Tod, Sterbehilfe: Soziale und Ethische Themen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Cover
Title Page
Contents
Foreword
Edita Schubert: A Life in Images
Edita Schubert: In the Midst of Significant Turmoil
Necklaces, Hairpins, and Swimming Costumes: Edita Schubert’s Early Pop Experiments
Edita Schubert’s Counterintuitive Analytics of Nature
The Canvas, the Body, and the Surgical Cut
Doors, Stairs, and Windows
Into the Vortex: Edita Schubert’s Anxious Visions of the Early 1980s
Making Nothing Out of Something: Multimedia Experiments
Edita Schubert’s War Images
Edita’s Reissfeder
Author Biographies
Copyright Page

Leseproben

Marko Ilic Edita Schubert: In the Midst of Significant Turmoil

“I had to plunge a knife into the canvas,” Edita Schubert confessed in a rare interview given during the final year of her life.1 Speaking with the art historian Leonida Kovac, she recalled the frustration of being forced to paint nudes as a student at Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts—and the urge to cut through what she described as the “taut surface on which [she] had to talk about something.”2 This urge took literal form in her Perforated Canvases (Perforirana platna) series of 1977, where she sliced triangular openings into large blue monochromes with a scalpel, neatly folding back the flaps and securing them with surgical tape (figs. see pp. 72–73). By poking her nose, fingers and other body parts through the slits and documenting the interventions in xeroxed photographs, Schubert staged a quiet rebellion—one that echoed the broader ethos of the first generation of artists born in socialist Yugoslavia, after 1945.

Trained as a painter, Schubert rejected the ossified modernism of her academic education, as well as the more conventional forms of painting and sculpture widely exhibited across Yugoslavia. Drawn to experimentation, her practice aligned with the sensibility of the country’s now celebrated New Art Practice (Nova umjetnicka praksa)—politically agile forms of conceptual and performance art that emerged in the late 1960s, striving to define the very role that art should play in a socialist society. But unlike the overtly politicized or critical gestures often associated with this loose movement of artists, Schubert’s esoteric work is somewhat more difficult to place. Wry and irreverent in its approach to media and an unlikely conjoining of materials, it resists simple categorization; it invites slow looking and embraces ambiguity, while often gesturing beyond the fixed coordinates of ideology, place, and time.

Yet despite a prolific career spanning three decades, Edita Schubert remains largely absent from many histories of Yugoslav art. In Impossible Histories—the first major English-language survey of the country’s “avant-garde movements”—she is mentioned only once, in passing, as a figure who emerged after the “crisis in Conceptual Art” and who represented a shift to the “eclectic postmodernist painting of the 1980s.”3 Though a form of recognition, the brief nature of the assertion calls for closer scrutiny. While somewhat of an independent figure, Schubert drew on the legacy of art in the earlier postwar decades even as she embraced new media. Refusing to settle on any one artistic idiom, her practice pushed against the rigid policing of aesthetic hierarchies and teleological views of artistic progress centered around dematerialization. Writing in 1985, leading critic Ješa Denegri placed her at the forefront of a new direction in Yugoslav art, shaped by what he termed a “practice of profusion” (praksa obilja), in contrast to the preceding era of “reduction.”4 Marijan Susovski, curator of the landmark 1978 exhibition pivotal in historicizing the New Art Practice, interpreted Schubert’s work as registering the “traumas” of that era: “nervousness, psychological pressures, latent fear [and] feelings of impending catastrophe.”5 For Susovski, Schubert’s paintings distilled what he called the “spirit of the times”—works forged, as he put it, “in the midst of significant turmoil.”6

Schubert arrived at this “turmoil” after an initial phase of producing hyperrealistic paintings of everyday objects. From the late 1970s, her work began to take a more conceptual turn—beginning with her first solo exhibition at Zagreb’s Vladimir Nazor Gallery (Galerija Vladimir Nazor) in 1978. At its center was a photograph that Schubert had taken of a dome of a madrasa in Pocitelj (today Bosnia and Herzegovina). Working across drawing, sculpture, printmaking, and installation, Schubert restaged the dome in myriad forms: coloring, sketching, and modeling it; encasing it in a trunk and note box; refiguring it as a st and transforming it into a suite of six varnished polyester objects arranged on an aluminum tray, their glossy surfaces evoking desserts ready for consumption ?. Reflecting on the project, Schubert recalled that it emerged as a response to an artistic climate saturated by discussions around objecthood: “everyone was talking about objects—object this way, object that way.”7 For her, the dome represented not only a motif, but an object that “had to be administratively processed.”8

[ Fig. 1 ] Edita Schubert, Cupola Istanbul – Cakes (Kupola Carigrad – Kolaci), 1977, varnished polyester sculptures on an aluminum tray; © Edita Schubert Estate, photo: Marina Paulenka

Rooted in the visual codes of Conceptual Art, Schubert’s self-described “bureaucratic processing of the dome” coincided with a broader sense of disillusionment among Yugoslav artists in the late 1970s, many of whom had come to see the “New Art” as the embodiment of a “new tradition.”9 Crafted by hand, her humble assemblages possess a warmth and material fragility that countered the slickness and regularity often associated with Conceptual Art, particularly those works based on tautological and language-based forms. Her assemblages also anticipated the influential critique of Conceptual Art that Benjamin Buchloh would make decades later as an “aesthetic of administration,” deeply enmeshed with the operating logic of capitalism—a logic that, as many have argued, had fully permeated Yugoslavia’s ostensibly socialist political economy by the mid-1970s.10 Refusing to fully embrace either “old” or “new” visual vocabularies, Schubert’s ambivalent project of “administration” laid bare how the “dematerialized art” of the 1960s was rarely ever so—leaving behind vast material residues in the form of postcards, posters, contracts, and photographic documentation.

Yet Schubert’s playful manipulation of the cupola—an architectural form typically associated with religion, power, and transcendence—also engages with another enduring strand of conceptualism: its mysticism.11 Through her various repetitions, Schubert seemed to suggest that the dome was not merely a form from a bygone past, but was instead intertwined with contemporary visual forms, as well as structures of governance and administration. In its irony and detachment from the seriousness and sense of responsibility typically associated with Yugoslavia’s “New Art,” one could speculate that this continual remaking also functioned as a soothing, cathartic act—shaping materials into a predetermined mold with one’s hands—while its obsessive proliferation hinted at an underlying awareness of the futility of such gestures.

At the same time that the cupola had captivated Schubert’s imagination, she began creating works that increasingly engaged with tactility, starting with the Herbarium (Herbarij) series of 1977. Named after collections of pressed plants used for scientific study, the series comprised eighteen pencil drawings on paper, each incorporating dry branches fixed to the surface with sticking plaster. Described by Kovac as a “conscious act of substituting an artificial or technologized drawing tool with a plant,” her gesture resonated with the work of the pioneering oho Group, who from 1968 had produced works seeking to liberate objects from their use value and offer an “anti-commodity” model of viewing.12 oho’s engagement with the natural environment also provided an important precedent for the sculptures that Schubert would develop from the late 1970s through the early 1980s, which incorporated materials such as branches, leather, paper, wax, and bitumen.

Amongst the earliest examples of these works belong to the Beds (Gredica) series of 1979, in which Schubert bound four stripped branches with leather ribbons to create small “garden plots,” as suggested by the title ?. Arranged on asphalt and grassy ground, these squares served as framing devices for compositions that included petals, leaves, and smaller twigs. Similarly, for 100 Roses (100 ruža), the artist bent and intertwined the branches of rambling roses to form two circles: one filled with the red petals of a hundred roses, and the other with the leaves stripped from their stems (fig. see pp. 58–59). Creating a dynamic composition of complementary colors, the work existed at the intersection of painting and sculpture. Bound, bandaged, and displayed in “unnatural” forms, they also possess a precarious quality, suggesting a temporary “taming” of their organic materials. Much like with the cupola series, Schubert’s use of simple shapes and rugged forms suggests that she took pleasure in manipulating these materials by hand, though some commentators at the time saw such works as evoking relics from an unknown ceremony; critic Zvonko Makovic, for example, described them as “ritualistic items, akin to the remnants of some historic game.”13

[ Fig. 2 ] Edita Schubert, Beds (Gredice), 1979, petals, leaves, twigs; © Edita Schubert Estate

Unpretentious in their materiality, Schubert’s spare, process-driven works belonged to a broader post-conceptual shift in Yugoslav art, one that has most frequently been associated with the work of Zagreb’s Grupa šestorice autora (Group of Six Authors). From 1975, this group similarly rejected the tautological tendencies of Anglo-American conceptualism in favor of...