‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, observes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue prior to picking up a surgical blade and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric 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, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – 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?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “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. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events 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

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded 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|