→ LECTURE

Leonida Kovać

Why Dissect a Painterly Canvas?

The lecture will present works of one of Croatia’s most important contemporary artists, Edita Schubert (1947–2001), produced from the early 1970s to 2000. Her seemingly incoherent oeuvre and ceaseless need for transgression of media borders will be read as a kind of “history of painting in experimental conditions.” Schubert’s transgressive innovations, which must be considered a feminist art practice despite her refusal to be designated as a feminist, or even a woman artist, will be contextualized by the institutional reception of works by women artists during the course of the 20^th century.

Leonida Kovač, PhD, is an art historian and theorist, curator, and full professor at the University of Zagreb, Academy of Fine Arts. She is concerned with contemporary art, feminist theory, and critical theory. Since the 1990s she has curated many exhibitions of women artists, such as Dorothy Cross, Rita Duffy, Katarzyna Kozyra, Orshi Drozdik, Nan Hoover, Duba Sambolec, Edita Schubert, Nasta Rojc, and Ana Opalić. She has published nine books, including Anonimalia: Normative Discourses and Self-Representation of 20^th Century Women Artists (2010), Tübingen’s Box: Essays on Visual Culture and Biopolitics (2013), In the Mirror of the Cultural Screen: Jagoda Kaloper (2013), and Mrđan Bajić: Disenacting Transversals (2016), and numerous academic articles. She was the curator of the Croatian Pavilion at the São Paulo Biennial in 2002 and the Venice Biennale in 2003. From 2002 to 2005 she was vice-president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA). She has organized or co-organized several international academic conferences, the most recent being “Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacy” (University of Amsterdam, 2019).