‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “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 medical students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for 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 oil and acrylic of confectionery and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

In 1977, that urge took literal form. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

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 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 felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred 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 organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. 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 present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|