‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. 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 secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of confectionery and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. She then folded back the sliced fabric to show the backside, 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.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: 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. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Shifting to Natural Materials

In the late 70s and early 80s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. 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|