‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching cadavers for study for textbooks for surgeons. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for medical students currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use held her perforated artworks together. 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. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of candies and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, 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.

“Yes, all my art has a character 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 hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the explanation continues. 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 began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, 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

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 duplicated and expanded them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|