‘I had to plunge the knife into 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 artist from Croatia held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for medical students in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare 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 were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

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 expose the underside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. Through a set of photos created in 1977, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed 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 those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. 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 an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

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. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. 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. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|