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

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” says a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. 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. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens became vessels for her autobiography.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it truly frustrated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “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 then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, 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 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 akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the narrative adds. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|