‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” says a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: 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,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department 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 traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” 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 – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” 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

During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. 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 was driven to cross lines – 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 positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. 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|