‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like creatives handle a paintbrush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Department of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Having two professional lives was not uncommon 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 became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in paints and mediums of candies and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she was required to depict nude figures. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, 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

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, 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,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy daily for hours on end without being affected by the surroundings.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it maps these clinical themes through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapeziums, as they came to be known. 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 inquired, how are these shapes created?” remembers a scholar. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s 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. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the work maintained its impact – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, 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.

Confronting the Violence of War

The 1990s arrived, bringing 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 duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|