‘I was compelled to drive the blade into the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations 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 showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” These detailed anatomical studies, observes a exhibition curator, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students currently in Croatia.

Where Two Realms Converged

A split career path was not rare for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies were transformed into tools for cutting fabric. The medical tape meant for wound dressing bound her fragmented pieces. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

A Creative Urge

During the beginning of the 1970s, 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. However, discontent had been growing since her academy years. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it truly frustrated me, that stretched surface I was forced to communicate upon,” she confided in a researcher, in a seldom-granted conversation. “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 then using an anatomical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. 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, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, 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 … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For a close friend and scholar, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Art commentators in Croatia often viewed her twin professions as wholly divided: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” explains a confidant. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute daily for hours on end and remain untouched by the environment.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

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. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, 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 distinctive hues – 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 within a reference book for surgeons utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

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 arranged collections of bone, petals, spices and ash on floors. Questioned about the move to natural substances, she expressed that the art world had become “barren theoretically”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the organic matter now fully desiccated though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” a commentator notes. “The colour is still there.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She eliminated select sketches, keeping merely autographed copies. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews 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 reproduced and magnified them. Then she painted over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|