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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” These detailed anatomical studies, notes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of confectionery 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 was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue 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 timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. 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, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, 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, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. 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.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|