‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. 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 secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory 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 produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of sweets and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

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 these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the 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 traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

In the late 70s and early 80s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Mystery was her method. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|