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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, precisely illustrating cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. 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 Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and condiment containers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “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 confided in a researcher, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric 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, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were the exact shades employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts 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.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|