‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” says a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, observes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

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. Around 1985, 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 inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. 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 felt an urge to break boundaries – 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 intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. 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. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified 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|