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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual 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. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of candies and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade 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. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. 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

Croatian critics have tended to treat her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The distinctive hues – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the narrative adds. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, 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. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, 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.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|