‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a museum curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, 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. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. 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. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, 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. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

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. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent 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 within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

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. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|