‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of candies and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” 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 Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. 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 pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” 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.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – 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 used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, the artist's work shifted direction again. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. 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 gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. 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. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. 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 painted over everything in acrylic – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|