‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, 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,” explains a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of candies and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” 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 the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “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 the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

In the late 70s and early 80s, 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. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to work with actual decaying material in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. 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. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

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 pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|