‘I was compelled to drive the blade into 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 Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, precisely illustrating cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, 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 curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, notes a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of sweets and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. 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 simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred 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. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing 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 reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|