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

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist worked at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements 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, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material 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, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

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, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – 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 intertwined the stalks into circular forms positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. 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.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|