‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic 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 had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, 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 stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter 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. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. 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. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

The 1990s arrived, bringing 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 painted over everything in acrylic – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|