‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade 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 was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a museum curator, are still featured in manuals for medical students in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The medical knives for anatomical dissection turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in paints and mediums of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the explanation continues. 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, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged 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|