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

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“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 deeply immersed in that work … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of candies 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 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.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. 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. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” 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.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, 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. “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.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

In the late 70s and early 80s, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

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. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she conducted hardly any media talks and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|