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

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students currently in Croatia.

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 surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of confectionery and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “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 thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” 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.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

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 – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – 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 in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, the artist's work shifted direction again. 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, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred 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 observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|