🔗 Share this article ‘I had to plunge the knife 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 late Croatian artist was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments. “She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for medical students currently in Croatia. The Bleeding of Two Worlds Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography. A Frustration That Cut Deep At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. 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 truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.” Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation That year, this desire became a concrete action. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material. “Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself. Two Lives, Deeply Connected Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.” Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers. “The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work. Shifting to Natural Materials 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 composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered. A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.” The Artist of Mystery “I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland. Responding to the Horrors of Conflict Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. 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|
Edita Schubert lived a double life. Over a period spanning thirty years, the late Croatian artist was employed by the Institute of Anatomy at the Zagreb University’s faculty of medicine, carefully sketching dissected human bodies for medical reference books. Within her artistic workspace, she produced art that eluded all labels – frequently employing the identical instruments. “She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in anatomy guides,” explains a curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work. “She was deeply immersed in that work … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her illustrations of human anatomy, comments a arts scholar, are still published in handbooks for medical students currently in Croatia. The Bleeding of Two Worlds Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for creatives in the former Yugoslavia, who seldom could rely on art sales. Yet, the fusion of these two domains was distinctive. The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers turned into devices for perforating paintings. Adhesive tape intended for bandages held her perforated artworks together. The test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography. A Frustration That Cut Deep At the start of the seventies, Schubert was initially operating within conventional painting boundaries. She produced meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in paints and mediums of confectionery and salt and sugar shakers. Yet, irritation had been festering since her training. 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 truly frustrated me, that tight canvas where I was expected to express myself,” she once explained to a scholar, in a seldom-granted conversation. “I thrust the blade into the painting in place of a brush.” Where Anatomical Practice Meets Creation That year, this desire became a concrete action. Schubert produced eleven large canvases. All were rendered in a uniform blue hue before taking a medical scalpel and performing countless measured, exact slices. She then folded back the sliced fabric to expose the underside, creating works she documented with forensic precision. She dated each one to underscore that they were actions. In a photographic series from that year, called Self-Portrait With a Perforated Work, she inserted her features, hair, and digits through the openings, turning her own body into artistic material. “Absolutely, my work possesses a dissective quality … dissection akin to a life study,” she responded to inquiries about the pieces. For a close friend and scholar, this statement was illuminating – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself. Two Lives, Deeply Connected Analysts frequently presented the artist's dual roles as completely distinct: the experimental avant garde artist on one side, the medical illustrator who paid the bills on the other. “My perspective is that her dual selves were intimately linked,” explains a confidant. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon without being affected by the surroundings.” Anatomical Echoes in Geometric Shapes A key insight from a ongoing display is how it traces these medical undercurrents in pieces that initially appear purely non-representational. Around 1985, she made a collection of angular works – trapezoidal forms, as they were later termed. Contemporary critics categorized them under the trendy neo-geo label. But the truth was discovered only years later, while examining her personal papers. “The question was posed: how are these forms made?” recalls a friend. “She explained simply: they represent a human face.” The signature tones – known among associates as her personal red and blue – matched the precise colors she’d been using to illustrate the two main arteries of the neck for a surgical anatomy textbook employed throughout European medical schools. “It became clear those hues emerged concurrently,” the account notes. The angular paintings were actually abstracted human forms – executed alongside her daily technical illustration work. Shifting to Natural Materials 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 composed displays of skeletal fragments, flower parts, herbs and soot. Questioned about the move to natural substances, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”. She was driven to cross lines – to engage with truly ephemeral substances as a response to art that had metaphorically withered. A 1979 piece entitled 100 Roses, featured her denuding a century of flowers. She intertwined the stalks into circular forms with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When encountered during exhibition preparation, it still held its power – the floral elements now totally preserved yet astonishingly whole. “You can still smell the roses,” one observer marvels. “The colour is still there.” The Artist of Mystery “I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” she revealed in terminal-year interviews. Secrecy was her strategy. She would sometimes exhibit fake works concealing genuine artworks beneath her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, only retaining signed reproductions. Although she participated in global art events and gaining recognition as a trailblazer, she gave almost no interviews and her output stayed mostly obscure internationally. A current museum exhibition is her first major solo show outside her homeland. Responding to the Horrors of Conflict Subsequently, the nineties dawned with the outbreak of conflict. War came to her city. The artist answered with a group of mixed-media works. 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|