‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

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 Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, 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 were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for 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. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, 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 stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, 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,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. 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 Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the narrative adds. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 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, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|