‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of candies and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, 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 … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, 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. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|