‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, 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 surgical handbooks,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of candies and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, 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 thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. 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. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “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.

Shifting to Natural Materials

In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“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. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|