‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

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 turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing 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 initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic 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 had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. 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 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, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook 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 – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, 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. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred 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 encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|