‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments 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 surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of candies and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” 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.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes 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. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt compelled to transgress – 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 intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|