‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for medical students currently in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. During her time at the Zagreb art school, 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, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “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.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. 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, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. 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|