‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” says a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. 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 taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “I have always believed that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, 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

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. 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|