‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: The artist Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush.

Edita Schubert led a dual existence. Over a period spanning thirty years, the artist from Croatia worked at the Anatomy Institute at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she produced art that eluded all labels – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in medical textbooks,” notes a curator of a new retrospective of the artist's oeuvre. “She was completely central to that discipline … She showed no hesitation in the presence of dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, observes a exhibition curator, are continually used in textbooks for medical students currently in Croatia.

The Intermingling of Dual Vocations

Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, 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 turned into devices for perforating paintings. The medical tape meant for wound dressing secured her sliced creations. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens evolved into receptacles for her personal history.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in acrylic and oil paints of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. While studying at the fine arts academy in Zagreb, the curriculum mandated life drawing. “I needed to drive the blade into the painting, it genuinely irritated me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she confided in a researcher, among the rare individuals she spoke with. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.”

The Artistic Performance of Cutting

That year, this desire became a concrete action. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric 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, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork.

“Indeed, my entire oeuvre carries a sense of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” the artist replied when asked about their meaning. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.

Two Lives, Deeply Connected

Analysts frequently presented Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the pioneering creator in one sphere, the technical draftsman funding her life in the other. “My opinion since then has been that these two identities were profoundly intertwined,” notes a close friend. “One cannot be employed for three decades in an anatomy department from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.”

Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes

The revelatory nature of a present showcase is how it maps these clinical themes in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, she made a collection of angular works – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Art writers grouped them with the popular geometric abstraction trend. However, the reality was uncovered much later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“I inquired, how are these shapes created?” states an associate. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue” – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook utilized in medical faculties across Europe. “I realised that those two colours appeared at the same time,” the narrative adds. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work.

A Turn Towards the Organic

In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. 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, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to work with actual decaying material as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She wove the stems into circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When observed in a curatorial context, the piece retained its potency – the leaves and petals now completely dried out though wonderfully undamaged. “The scent of roses persists,” one observer marvels. “The hue has endured.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided during one of her final conversations. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Even with showings at prestigious exhibitions and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she conducted hardly any media talks and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A present retrospective marks her first significant external showcase.

Addressing the Trauma of Battle

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 reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – rectangular forms reminiscent of scanning lines. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|