‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, notes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for medical students in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

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 sweets and condiment containers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, 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 Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. 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. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, the artist's work shifted direction again. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to work with actual decaying material as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “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. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. 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.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. 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 – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|