‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of confectionery and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” states a scholar. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “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 used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the narrative adds. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, the artist's work shifted direction again. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

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, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions 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.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|