‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and condiment containers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. Through a set of photos created in 1977, 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.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

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. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – 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 employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. 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.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, 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. 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. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged 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|