‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

In the early 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of candies and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. 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 truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. She then folded back the sliced fabric to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“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 statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been 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 and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – 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 began creating installations from branches bound with leather. 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 was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“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 while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

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 painted over everything in acrylic – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|