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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Anatomy Institute at the medical school of the University of Zagreb, carefully sketching cadavers for study for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – often using the very same tools.

“Her work involved crafting these meticulous, technical diagrams which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains 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, notes a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for medical students to this day in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

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 scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of confectionery 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 was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it genuinely irritated me, 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

In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to show the backside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In one 1977 series of photographs, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “I have always believed that her dual selves were intimately linked,” notes a close friend. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it maps these clinical themes within creations that superficially look completely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, 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 for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the account notes. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather. She arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. 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 work with actual decaying material in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

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 work maintained its impact – the organic matter now fully desiccated but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eliminated select sketches, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Although she participated in global art events and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she granted virtually no press access and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. 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. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|