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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the artist from Croatia worked at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” These detailed anatomical studies, notes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of sweets and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. Through a set of photos created in 1977, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. 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 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,” states a scholar. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. 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. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert 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 angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Embracing Ephemeral Elements

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. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – 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 braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The pigmentation survives.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she conducted hardly any media talks 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

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. 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|