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

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, 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 organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for medical students to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable 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. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. 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 genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” 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

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end 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 within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. 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, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access 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

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|