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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, notes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use held her perforated artworks together. 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 working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets 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 needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

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. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, 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. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 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 yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. 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 gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|