‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” says a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

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. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” 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 without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – 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 within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – 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 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 leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions 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.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|