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

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia 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 created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and condiment containers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Questioned about the move to natural substances, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. 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, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|