‘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. 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 human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” says a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, notes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated 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 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 then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” states a scholar. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. 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.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. 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 compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements placing the foliage and petals within. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

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 concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|