‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like painters use a brush.

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

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for medical students to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of confectionery and tabletop items. 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 was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. 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,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase 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 – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. 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. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|