‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist 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 Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” says a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. 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. Surgical tape designed for medical use held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of candies and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. During her time at the Zagreb art school, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. 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 pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. 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?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “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.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She was driven to cross lines – 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 positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. 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|