‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and condiment containers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. 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 simply got on my nerves, 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

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. 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 expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” 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 the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to engage with truly ephemeral substances 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 braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

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 reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|