‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator was employed by the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching 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 surgical handbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a museum curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “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 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. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, 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 … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – 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 within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, the artist's work shifted direction again. 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 an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews 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

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|