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

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

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 confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, 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.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. 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, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“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 – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books in a manual for surgical anatomy utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “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

In the late 70s and early 80s, her creative approach changed once more. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. 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.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|