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

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator was employed by the Department of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching cadavers for study for medical reference books. In her private atelier, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” explains 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 anatomical drawings, observes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of sweets and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. 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 pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the radical innovator in one corner, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is 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 and remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were identical tints she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – 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, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

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 work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” a viewer remarks. “The colour is still there.”

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, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. 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. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|