‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like other artists wield a brush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. 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,” notes a director of a current show of the artist's oeuvre. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for anatomy students to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of candies and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “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 Act of Dissection Becomes Art

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. Through a set of photos created in 1977, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been 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 without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is the way it follows these anatomical influences within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, while examining her personal papers.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” remembers a scholar. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook 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 – 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 positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. When asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“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 stashing authentic works out of sight. She eradicated specific works, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she granted virtually no press access and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Confronting the Violence of War

Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|