‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like creatives handle a paintbrush.

The life of Edita Schubert was one of two distinct halves. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Department of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says a curator of a new retrospective of her artistic output. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, comments a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students currently 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 surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of sweets 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 needed to drive the blade into the painting, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

The Act of Dissection Becomes Art

That year, this desire became a concrete action. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue prior to picking up a surgical blade and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: 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 eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Medical Undercurrents in Abstract Forms

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents within creations that superficially look completely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers.

“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” remembers a scholar. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the explanation continues. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. She composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Inquired regarding the change to ephemeral components, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as an answer to conceptually sterile work.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “You can still smell the roses,” a viewer remarks. “The hue has endured.”

The Artist of Mystery

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Mystery was her method. On occasion, she displayed counterfeit pieces stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and receiving acclaim as an innovator, she conducted hardly any media talks and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

Then came the 1990s, and 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 duplicated and expanded them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|