Edita Schubert. Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas

About

Edita Schubert’s (1947-2001) entire oeuvre can be seen as a continuously evolving attempt to solve the problem of representation of the self and the human body. Drawing on her dayjob as draughtsperson at the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb's Medical School, she transgressed boundaries between media and disciplines in her incisive investigation of the anatomy of an artwork and of the self. Titled after her 1977 Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, the exhibition centers around a selection of her large-format perforated canvases fom the late 1970s and a performance for the camera in which she activated these works by poking different body parts through the slits in the canvas and documenting these protrusions.

While Schubert exhibited widely in her native Croatia during her 3 decades of artistic production, including representing Yugoslavia in the Venice Biennale in 1982 and a comprehensive posthumous retrospective at the Klovićevi Dvori Gallery in Zagreb in 2015, Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas marks her first exhibition in Germany.