‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of candies and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. 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 inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“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 glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

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,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

In the late 70s and early 80s, 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, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. 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, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“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. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|