‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert used her surgical blade like painters use a brush.

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for textbooks for surgeons. In her private atelier, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” explains a organizer of a fresh exhibition of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was entirely comfortable in the dissection room.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a museum curator, are continually used in textbooks for surgical trainees currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Having two professional lives was not uncommon for artists from Yugoslavia, who rarely had access to a commercial art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The medical knives for anatomical dissection turned into devices for perforating paintings. Surgical tape designed for medical use secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens became vessels for her autobiography.

A Frustration That Cut Deep

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still creating within the limits of classic art. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. During her time at the Zagreb art school, she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it simply got on my nerves, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she later told an art historian, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”

Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation

That year, this desire became a concrete action. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. She painted each one a blue monochrome then using an anatomical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. 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 … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. For a close friend and scholar, this explanation was a key insight – a hint from a creator who seldom offered commentary.

A Dual Existence, Inextricably Linked

Croatian critics have tended to treat the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the anatomical artist supporting herself separately. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from early morning to mid-afternoon and remain untouched by the environment.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapeziums, as they came to be known. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, during an archival review of her possessions.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” The distinctive hues – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were identical tints employed to depict cervical arteries in medical texts for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “The connection was that both colors surfaced simultaneously,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

Shifting to Natural Materials

During the transition into the 1980s, the artist's work shifted direction again. She started making assemblages from twigs secured with hide. 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 felt an urge to break boundaries – to utilize genuinely perishable matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

An artwork dating to 1979, One Hundred Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She braided the stems into round arrangements with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact. “The aroma remains,” a viewer remarks. “The hue has endured.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I prefer to stay cryptic, to hide my intentions,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Obscurity was her technique. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She eliminated select sketches, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her art was predominantly unrecognized abroad. An ongoing display represents the initial large-scale presentation of her work internationally.

Responding to the Horrors of Conflict

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars. Violence reached Zagreb itself. She reacted with a collection of assembled pieces. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She duplicated and expanded 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|