‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia held a position at the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, carefully sketching human anatomical specimens for medical reference books. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a director of a current show of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students in Croatia today.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who often lacked a viable art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in oil and acrylic of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it genuinely irritated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she later told an art historian, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I used the knife to pierce the canvas, not a paintbrush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. Each was coated in a single shade of blue then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, transforming her physical self into creative matter.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “I have always believed that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

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 – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The signature tones – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck in a manual for surgical anatomy used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the explanation continues. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

Shifting to Natural Materials

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 positioned gatherings of osseous material, floral remains, seasonings and cinders. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

A 1979 piece entitled 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 leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The pigmentation survives.”

A Practitioner of Secrecy

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks 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. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|