‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for medical students currently in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes 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, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “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 confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. 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, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute daily for hours on end and not be influenced by what you see there.”

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, 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, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

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. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, 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 pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she granted virtually no press access and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|