‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

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 surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory 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. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of confectionery and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas 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 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,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is 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

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “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 for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, her creative approach changed once more. 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, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

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 encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. 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.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|