‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like painters use a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, 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,” says a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for medical students to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. 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 creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of candies and salt and sugar shakers. 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 genuinely irritated me, 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 used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

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 making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's 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 within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, 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.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|