‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a director of a current show 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, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for medical students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, 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 held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of candies and condiment containers. 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 taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, 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” – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material 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 observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eliminated select sketches, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. 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. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|