‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her studio, 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 curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. 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 still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of candies and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. 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, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

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 – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: 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 for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|