‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” says a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of candies and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The distinctive hues – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. 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 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 wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she granted virtually no press access and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|