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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “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 anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. 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. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of candies and condiment containers. 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 genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome prior to picking up a surgical blade and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. 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 an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. 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|