‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist 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 worked at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a director of a current show of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” These detailed anatomical studies, observes a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in paints and mediums of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical 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 dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

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 these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

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 engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged 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|