‘I had to plunge the knife into 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 late Croatian artist held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for medical students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in oil and acrylic of confectionery and condiment containers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, 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. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue 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. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. 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 Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – 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

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. 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 present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. 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. Then she obscured the surface with paint – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|