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

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” says a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon 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 were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use held her perforated artworks together. 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 still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of candies and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, 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. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome prior to picking up a surgical blade and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. 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, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to work with actual decaying material as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|