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

Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator held a position at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing human anatomical specimens for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – regularly utilizing the exact implements.

“She created these highly accurate, technical drawings which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, notes a exhibition curator, are still published in handbooks for anatomy students to this day in Croatia.

The Bleeding of Two Worlds

A split career path was not rare for Yugoslav artists, who often lacked a viable art market. However, the manner in which these spheres merged was unique. The medical knives for anatomical dissection became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Glass vials usually meant for scientific specimens transformed into containers for her life story.

An Artistic Restlessness

At the start of the seventies, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. Her work included detailed, photorealistic compositions in paints and mediums of sweets and tabletop items. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, she was required to depict nude figures. “I was compelled to stab the knife through the fabric, it simply got on my nerves, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something,” she later told an art historian, 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. She made eleven big pieces. Each was coated in a single shade of blue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. Afterwards, she peeled back the severed canvas to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She timestamped each to emphasize their nature as events. Through a set of photos created in 1977, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she pressed her visage, locks, and hands into the cuts, turning her own body into artistic material.

“Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection like an evening nude,” Schubert answered regarding the works' significance. According to a trusted associate and academic, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure.

Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots

Analysts frequently presented 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,” notes a close friend. “It's impossible to spend 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”

Biological Inspirations Beneath the Surface

What makes a current exhibition particularly revelatory is the way it follows these anatomical influences in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. During the middle of the 1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – geometric shapes, subsequently labeled. Yugoslav critics lumped them into the fashionable neo-geo movement. Yet, the actual inspiration was found subsequently, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.

“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 used for drawing neck vasculature in anatomy books 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.

A Turn Towards the Organic

During the transition into the 1980s, her creative approach changed once more. 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 utilize genuinely perishable matter in reaction to a creatively arid landscape.

One work from 1979, 100 Roses, involved her removing petals from a hundred blooms. She braided the stems into round arrangements positioning the floral remnants in the center. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out yet astonishingly whole. “The aroma remains,” a commentator notes. “The hue has endured.”

An Elusive Creative Force

“My aim is to remain enigmatic, to conceal my process,” the artist shared in late-life discussions. Secrecy was her strategy. At times, she showed inauthentic creations stashing authentic works out of sight. She destroyed certain drawings, keeping merely autographed copies. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she granted virtually no press access and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. 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. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. She adhered press images and headlines onto panels. She reproduced and magnified them. Then she obscured the surface with paint – black bars resembling barcodes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|