Discover the experimental work of overlooked Croatian artist Edita Schubert

Muzeum Susch is an idyllic exhibition space, situated within a medieval former monastery in the Swiss mountains. Featuring grottos and bare rock faces, the gallery is home to a series of long-running exhibitions that highlight the work of ‘overlooked or misunderstood’ artists. Its newest show homes in on Edita Schubert, the Croatian artist who made richly experimental work in the second half of the 20th century.

'She made the most amazing handbrake turns,' says curator David Crowley, of her nimble practice. The exhibition features early paintings from the 1970s that delved into Yugoslavia’s 'unexpected form of socialism', taking on a 'pop sensibility' and exploring a world of young women consumers. There are also canvases slashed by knives, expansive bitumen works, and geometric pieces that play with the heavily abstracted body. This is Schubert’s first major retrospective outside Croatia, drawn from her archive, which has been lovingly managed by Leonida Kovač since the artist’s death in 2001, at the age of 54.

While her work was guided in many ways by her own life and location, the exhibition presents Schubert as an artist who surpassed a specific time and place. 'In 2025, the work is at some distance from its original Yugoslav history and context,' says Crowley. 'There are points that engage directly with Yugoslav and Croatian history into the 1990s. But I think the work looks very resonant because of where we are here and now.' Schubert often explored the natural world, using organic materials to produce quasi-ritualistic objects whose sensitivity to nature, Crowley says, 'looks very different in 2025' as we stand on the brink of environmental collapse.

Schubert’s eclectic but rigorous conceptual approach has been compared to Hanna Wilke and Lucio Fontana, though she did not align herself with any specific group. 'She was such an independent-minded person and was very reluctant to describe her work,' says Crowley. 'She didn’t make strong declarations of being in dialogue with other artists, but it’s really evident when you look at the work.' He references her large painterly bitumen panels, which spread up to 3m wide, as a dialogue with the 1980s return to painting and the transavantgarde movement.

The artist’s anatomy training also feeds the work in unexpected ways. She worked as an illustrator at the Institute of Anatomy, watching dissections and creating training and research materials that showed exposed insides. The body would have an ongoing role in her work, through its absence rather than literal presence. A series of pieces that Crowley describes as 'hard edged geometry' communicate the human form in an abstract manner. She was 'not declaring or revealing but pointing to the body in an interesting way'.

Schubert also used knives to stab and create openings in her canvases, rejecting the formal tool of the paintbrush. In 2000, she claimed, 'I had to plunge [the] 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.' While this could be seen as a connection with her anatomical work, Crowley sees a deep irritation with her formal art training in this action: 'It was quite challenging to be an artist in the 1970s and 1980s. People were trained in very good painterly techniques, there was lots of work with models and still lifes. It was obvious she was frustrated with this training, which often produced these highly venerated male professors. That slashing of the canvas is biographical.'

Openings and thresholds would recur through her practice. Later 'horizon' works ask viewers to stand within photographic objects and adopt her viewing position, while the expanse of the bitumen pieces invite visitors to 'lose sense of the world around the work'. The show includes a series of doorways in 'striking' electric variants of blue, pink and yellow, which invite the potential of walking through without providing the physical possibility.

This show celebrates an artist unafraid to keep evolving. 'I think she was reluctant to perform in a singular channel of her own practice,' Crowley tells me. 'When she became curious about something new, she would do these incredible knight’s moves.'

Edita Schubert at Muzeum Susch until 24 May 2026

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