‘I felt forced to stab the knife through 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 worked at the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in surgical handbooks,” 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.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in paints and mediums of confectionery and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. 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 truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” 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 the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “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.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|