‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: 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 worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, 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,” says a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual 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 turned into devices for perforating paintings. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of candies and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, 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. 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 reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, 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 … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “I have always believed that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were the exact shades employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – 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 intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. 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 receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|