‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

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, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. 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 anatomy guides,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, notes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. 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 Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of confectionery and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. 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, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – 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 in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales 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.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

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 duplicated and expanded them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|