‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. 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 pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, 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 a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, 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 an urge to break boundaries – to work with actual decaying material 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 with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales 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.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|