‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her private atelier, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples transformed into containers for her life story.

A Creative Urge

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

By 1977, this impulse manifested physically. The artist created eleven sizable paintings. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue then using an anatomical scalpel and executing numerous intentional, accurate incisions. Subsequently, she turned back the cut material to expose the underside, producing pieces recorded with clinical accuracy. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. Through a set of photos created in 1977, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … anatomical analysis similar to figure drawing,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Analysts frequently presented her twin professions as wholly divided: the radical innovator in one corner, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My perspective is that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, the artist created a group of shaped canvases – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, during an archival review of her possessions.

“The question was posed: how are these forms made?” states an associate. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – termed “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” by peers – matched the precise colors employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts in a manual for surgical anatomy employed throughout European medical schools. “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

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 arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. 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 work with actual decaying material 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 with the leaves and petals arranged inside. Upon being viewed while organizing a show, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” 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. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

The 1990s arrived, bringing the Yugoslav Wars. Hostilities impacted the capital directly. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She glued journalistic imagery and type onto surfaces. She reproduced and magnified 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|