‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a museum curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

In 1977, that urge took literal form. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – 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 started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she granted virtually no press access and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|