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

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” notes a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for medical students to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial 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. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

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 oil and acrylic of candies and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. During her time at the Zagreb art school, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” 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 Act of Dissection Becomes Art

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, 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.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “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 from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents 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. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She was driven to cross lines – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

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 adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|