‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like painters use a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of sweets and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it simply got on my nerves, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric to expose the underside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” 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.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

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,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute daily for hours on end and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – 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.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, 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, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

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 glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She photocopied and enlarged 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|