‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Department 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 – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” notes a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a museum curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for 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. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. 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 simply got on my nerves, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented 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 her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “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

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. 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?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. 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 engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|