‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist worked at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her private atelier, 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 organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” These detailed anatomical studies, observes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual 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 became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on 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 and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” 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

During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. 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,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews 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

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. 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 – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|