‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for medical students currently in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of candies and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. 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 taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. She then folded back the sliced fabric to expose the underside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. 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 like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” 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 and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were the exact shades used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the explanation continues. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

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 positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

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, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. 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 gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|