‘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. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing 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 deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon 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 became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of sweets and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. 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 pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – 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. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

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 arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. 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 a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 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. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. 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 being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she conducted hardly any media talks 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. War came to her city. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. 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|