‘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. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in anatomy guides,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a museum curator, are still featured in manuals for medical students currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The medical knives for anatomical dissection were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She crafted precise, ultra-realistic arrangements in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and tabletop items. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “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, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. 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, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

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. “My perspective is that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” 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 remain untouched by the environment.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – 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, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. 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 a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms placing the foliage and petals within. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “The scent of roses persists,” a viewer remarks. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Mystery was her method. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she gave almost no interviews 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. War came to her city. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She duplicated and expanded 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|