🔗 Share this article ‘I felt forced to stab the knife through the canvas’: Edita Schubert brandished her medical instrument like painters use a brush. Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools. “She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students currently in Croatia. Where Two Realms Converged Having two professional lives was not uncommon for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography. A Frustration That Cut Deep In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, 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 once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.” The Artistic Performance of Cutting In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork. “Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure. Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “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 A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. 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?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing. Embracing Ephemeral Elements Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, 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, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered. One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” 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. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland. Addressing the Trauma of Battle Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|
Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the esteemed Croatian creator was employed by the Anatomy Institute at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, precisely illustrating dissected human bodies for medical reference books. In her studio, she created work that defied simple classification – often using the very same tools. “She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in surgical handbooks,” notes a organizer of a fresh exhibition of her artistic output. “She was completely central to that discipline … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still featured in manuals for anatomy students currently in Croatia. Where Two Realms Converged Having two professional lives was not uncommon for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was. The surgical blades for precise cuts on bodies became instruments for slicing canvas. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. Laboratory tubes commonly used for samples became vessels for her autobiography. A Frustration That Cut Deep In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in acrylic and oil paints of sweets and salt and sugar shakers. But frustration had been building since her student days. At Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, 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 once explained to a scholar, one of the few people she ever granted an interview. “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.” The Artistic Performance of Cutting In 1977, that urge took literal form. She made eleven big pieces. She painted each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, fashioning artworks catalogued with scientific detail. Marking each with a date highlighted their status as performances. In a photographic series from that year, titled Self-Portrait Through a Sliced Painting, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, making her own form part of the artwork. “Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For an intimate confidant and researcher, this explanation was a key insight – a glimpse into the mind of an elusive figure. Separate Careers, Intertwined Roots Croatian critics have tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My opinion since then has been that those two personalities were deeply, deeply connected,” explains a confidant. “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 A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents through works that, at first glance, seem entirely abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. 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?” recalls a friend. “Her response was straightforward: it's a human face.” Those characteristic colours – known among associates as her personal red and blue – were the exact shades she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook used across European medical faculties. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The shaped canvases were essentially distilled anatomical studies – created concurrently with her daytime medical drawing. Embracing Ephemeral Elements Towards the end of the seventies and start of the eighties, 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, the artist stated that contemporary art had “dried up intellectually”. She felt an urge to break boundaries – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered. One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals. She wove the stems into circles on the ground positioning the floral remnants in the center. When observed in a curatorial context, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved but miraculously intact. “The scent of roses persists,” 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. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Despite exhibiting at major international biennales and being celebrated as a pioneering figure, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside her region. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland. Addressing the Trauma of Battle Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. Violence reached Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages. She pasted newspaper photographs and text directly on to board. She reproduced and magnified them. Subsequently, she overpainted all elements – dark stripes akin to product codes. {Geometric forms obscured the images beneath|Angular shapes hid the pictures below|