‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching cadavers for study for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers 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 became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in acrylic and oil paints of confectionery and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she confided in a researcher, 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

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented 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 her dual selves were intimately linked,” 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 remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. 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 compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

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 observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. 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 photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|