Edita Schubert
Edita Schubert graduated in painting from Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1971 and thereafter went to work as a draughtswoman at the University of Zagreb School of Medicine’s Institute of Anatomy. This employment was an important factor in her artistic work, which was usually based on the image of the human figure. Her output as a painter constantly questioned the limits set by the medium. Schubert experimented with the format of the canvas as well as with representation itself, using rectangular shapes as simplified depictions of human beings. These forms resonate with the shapes of her canvases.
In the “Perforated Canvas” series (1977), she opened the surfaces of her works toward everyday life in defiance of art’s autonomy. These works also signify her interest in the limitations of the gaze. In the performance with which she activated her “Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas,” she installed a reproduction of “The Tempest” by Giorgione behind the painting. A slit enabled the viewer to see Giorgione’s painted landscape. This investigation was continued in one of Schubert’s final works, entitled “Horizon” (2000). This consisted of landscape panoramas painted on both sides of a narrow strip of paper that was then used to form a horizontal circle and hung from the ceiling, enabling viewers to position themselves either inside the landscape or outside of it. Schubert also devoted a series of works to the concept of the cupola, a shape that she constructed with painted plaster or xeroxed from architectural publications. Her interest was in the reproduction of this basic shape. She described this series as an endeavor centered on the bureaucratic aspect of conceptual art: “That was the seventies, everyone was talking about objects—object this way, object that way—and then I conceived of this dome as an object that had to be administratively processed. That’s just how it’s written, administrative processing of an object, bureaucratically, as if for a card index system, administrative processing of the object.” D.M.
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