‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in anatomy guides,” says a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of candies and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

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 expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. 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, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character 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 glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “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.”

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. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. 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. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “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, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks 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. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. 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|