‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia worked at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” says a director of a current show of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, 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 turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of candies and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

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 prior to picking up a surgical blade and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” notes a close friend. “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.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. Around 1985, 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. But the truth was discovered only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

During the transition into the 1980s, 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. Questioned about the move to natural substances, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances 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 with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

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 – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|