‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her private atelier, 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,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of candies and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, 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

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. 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, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, 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.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged 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|