‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of sweets and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. 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 tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, 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.

“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 was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – 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.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. 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 in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. 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. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|