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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her studio, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of candies and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. 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, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “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.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

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. Questioned about the move to natural substances, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

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 glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|