‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating cadavers for study for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in anatomy guides,” notes 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.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of sweets and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

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. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – 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, while examining her personal papers.

“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 – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the piece retained its potency – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. 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 – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|