‘I was compelled to drive the blade 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 artist from Croatia was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students currently in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and tabletop items. 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 once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “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. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, 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 … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” 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

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“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 used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “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.

Shifting to Natural Materials

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. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. 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 commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|