‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist worked at the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a director of a current show of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” These detailed anatomical studies, observes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection turned into devices for perforating paintings. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

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 executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, 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 like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “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.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the narrative adds. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, Schubert’s practice took another turn. 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 compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“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 while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she granted virtually no press access and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|