‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her studio, 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,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in paints and mediums of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. 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 stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

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 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 traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were the exact shades used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. 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, 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.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. 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|