‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, precisely illustrating cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a arts scholar, 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 rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in paints and mediums of sweets and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, 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 Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. 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. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. According to a trusted associate and academic, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|