‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching cadavers for study for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for creatives in the former 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. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

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 reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

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 anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

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. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eliminated select sketches, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, 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.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|