‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, 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 her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. She then folded back the sliced fabric to show the backside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

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 utilize genuinely perishable matter 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 with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” a viewer remarks. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|