‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for medical students currently in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of candies and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|