‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist worked at the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. 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 oil and acrylic of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome 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 timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – 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 radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” 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.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. 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. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent 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 in a manual for surgical anatomy 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 – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. 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.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|