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

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist worked at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, 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,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of confectionery and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. 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 show the backside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, 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 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 clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

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 these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. 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 began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eliminated select sketches, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions 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

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. 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|