‘I had to plunge the knife into 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. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. 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 surgical handbooks,” says a curator of a new retrospective 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, notes a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “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 confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “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

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” 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. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. 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 current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|