‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, precisely illustrating cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages secured her sliced creations. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in paints and mediums of candies and tabletop items. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The distinctive hues – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “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.

Shifting to Natural Materials

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, 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. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter 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 with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” a viewer remarks. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. 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|