‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her studio, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in medical textbooks,” says a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, observes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, 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 were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of sweets and condiment containers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, 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 … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” 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

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. 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 inquired, how are these shapes created?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons employed throughout European medical schools. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – 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, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. 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 compelled to transgress – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms positioning the floral remnants in the center. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Obscurity was her technique. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. 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|