‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like other artists wield 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 University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees to this day in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual 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. Adhesive tape intended for bandages bound her fragmented pieces. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of confectionery and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. During her time at the Zagreb art school, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. 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 show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. 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 akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

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. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” states a scholar. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors 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 angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

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 composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material 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. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|