‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use 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 Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a director of a current show of her artistic output. “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 still published in handbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon 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 were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing 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 working within the confines of traditional painting. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, 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 thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. 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. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, 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 early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The signature tones – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck 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.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. 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

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|