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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a arts scholar, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare 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 secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

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 confectionery and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. During her time at the Zagreb art school, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

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 then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, 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 – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She wove the stems into circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

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 – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|