‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

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 turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Confronting the Violence of War

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 – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|