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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, precisely illustrating cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. In her studio, 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,” says a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for artists from Yugoslavia, 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 turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

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. She then folded back the sliced fabric to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “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 from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the narrative adds. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, the artist's work shifted direction again. 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 was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “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. Mystery was her method. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified 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|