‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, precisely illustrating cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, comments a museum curator, are still published in handbooks for surgical trainees in Croatia today.

Where Two Realms Converged

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, 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 were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. Surgical tape designed for medical use held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of candies and salt and sugar shakers. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. In one 1977 series of photographs, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that her dual selves were intimately linked,” states a scholar. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department daily for hours on end and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, while examining her personal papers.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – were identical tints she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. She initiated works using wood lashed with straps. 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 an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the work maintained its impact – the floral elements now totally preserved though wonderfully undamaged. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|