‘I had to plunge the knife 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 esteemed Croatian creator worked at the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in surgical handbooks,” says 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, observes a museum curator, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Laboratory tubes commonly used for 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 produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and condiment containers. 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 was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute daily for hours on end and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase 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 – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The distinctive hues – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were the exact shades 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 – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

In the late 70s and early 80s, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to work with actual decaying material as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She wove the stems into circles on the ground placing the foliage and petals within. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she granted virtually no press access and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|