‘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. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist worked 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 – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” says a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks 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. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and condiment containers. But frustration had been building since her student days. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it genuinely irritated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material 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, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the radical innovator in one corner, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – 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 braided the stems into round arrangements placing the foliage and petals within. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” 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. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Confronting the Violence of War

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded 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|