‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: 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 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,” says a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, observes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of confectionery 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 had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. 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. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, 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 … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, the artist's work shifted direction again. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 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, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|