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

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, observes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of confectionery and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

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 then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, 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 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 … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “I have always believed that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“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 she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Shifting to Natural Materials

In the late 70s and early 80s, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|