‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, observes a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of confectionery and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. 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. 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 inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, 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 statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much 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 the exact shades used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

In the late 70s and early 80s, 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. 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.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. 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|