‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of sweets and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome prior to picking up a surgical blade and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material 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, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, 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. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy 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 the way it follows these anatomical influences in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – 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 in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “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. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded 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|