‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of candies and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, 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.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented 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 these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

In the late 70s and early 80s, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “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. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. 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|