‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Throughout a career lasting over thirty years, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for textbooks for surgeons. In her private atelier, 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 anatomy guides,” says a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a commercial 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 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 sweets and salt and sugar shakers. 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 needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she once explained to a scholar, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue prior to picking up a surgical blade and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

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. In the mid-1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“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 – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, her creative approach changed once more. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt compelled to transgress – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She wove the stems into circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works 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 granted virtually no press access and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She photocopied and enlarged them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|