‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, observes a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for medical students to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of sweets and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. 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 stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” states a scholar. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 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, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – 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 initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. 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 engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The hue has endured.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events 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.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. 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 – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|