‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist worked at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her private atelier, 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 Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, observes a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in acrylic and oil paints of candies and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. 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, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|