‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

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 University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” says 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 anatomical drawings, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

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 salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, 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, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-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, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“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 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 work remained largely unknown outside her region. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|