‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” says a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for artists from Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of candies and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric 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, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat 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 those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, the artist's work shifted direction again. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The hue has endured.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged 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|