‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. 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 anatomy guides,” says a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon 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 were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of confectionery and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat 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 those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert 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 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 initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Questioned about the move to natural substances, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 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. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eliminated select sketches, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and receiving acclaim as an innovator, 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.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|