‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her studio, 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,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, observes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of candies and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” 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.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas 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 pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: 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 in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material 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 placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she granted virtually no press access and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. 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|