‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a director of a current show of the artist's oeuvre. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, 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. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “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, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. According to a trusted associate and academic, this statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – 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, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts 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 angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. 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|