‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” says 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.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a museum curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for creatives in the former 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 became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of candies and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, 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 stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

In 1977, that urge took literal form. 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, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” states a scholar. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, 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. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the explanation continues. 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, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to work with actual decaying material as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded 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|