“I had to stick the knife into the canvas”: Edita Schubert used her scalpel as other artists use a brush | Art and design

eDita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Zagreb, where he meticulously drew dissected human bodies for use in surgical textbooks. In her studio, she created art that resisted all attempts at categorization – often using the same tools.

“She was producing these very precise, technical illustrations that were used in medical textbooks,” says David Crowley, curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work at the Suchs Museum in eastern Switzerland. “She was in the middle of that practice… she wasn’t exactly bothered about being in an autopsy.” Marica Komić, the museum’s curator, points out that her anatomical drawings are still published in manuals for medical students in Croatia today.

Schubert’s dual career was not unusual for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to the commercial art market. But the way these two worlds bled into each other was… The scalpels she used to make clean incisions in cadavers became tools for cutting fabric, the medical tape intended for dressing wounds bound her perforated artworks together, and the test tubes usually reserved for laboratory specimens became receptacles for her autobiography.

In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting – delicate, realistic oil and acrylic still lifes of sweets (Candit, 1973) and salt and sugar shakers (Salt and Sugar, 1973). But frustration had been building since her student days at the Zagreb Academy of Fine Arts, where she was forced to paint nudes. “I had to stick the knife into the canvas,” she later told art historian Leonida Kovac, one of the few people she interviewed, “it unnerved me, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something, with my brush, and more.” “I stabbed the knife into the cloth instead of the brush.”

In 1977, this desire took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases, painting each one in monochrome blue before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. She then folded the cut fabric back to reveal its reverse, creating works that she documented with forensic precision, dating each one to emphasize that they were mere actions, even performances. In a 1977 series of photographs, “Self-Portrait Behind Perforated Canvas,” she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the holes, transforming her body into an art object.

Kovac, who became a close friend of Schubert, listened to the artist’s explanation of these works. When asked about its meaning, Schubert replied: “Yes, every art has the character of anatomy…Anatomy is like a naked evening.” For Kovac, this was a revelation — evidence from an artist who rarely explains herself.

Croatian critics tended to treat Schubert’s two lives as entirely separate: the experimental avant-garde artist on the one hand, and the bill-paying medical painter on the other. “My opinion ever since is that these two personalities were deeply connected,” Kovac explains. “You cannot work for 35 years at the Anatomy Institute from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be affected by what you see there.”

What makes the Muzeum Susch exhibition particularly interesting is how it traces these medical currents through works that at first glance seem quite abstract. In the mid-1980s, Schubert produced a series of geometric paintings – trapezoids, as they became known – which were collected by Yugoslav critics in the fashionable Geogiouni movement. But Kovac discovered the truth only years later, when he cataloged Schubert’s estate.

“I asked her, ‘How do you make a trapezoid?’” Kovac recalls. “And she said, ‘It’s very simple, it’s a human face.’ Those distinctive colors—which her colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert blue”—were the same shades she used to illustrate the two main arteries in the neck in the surgical anatomy textbook used in European medical schools. “I realized that these are two colors […] “It appeared at the same time,” Kovach explains. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylized human bodies – drawn while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating compositions of leather-bound branches and collections of bones, petals, spices, and ashes arranged on floors. When I asked Kovac why she turned to such organic materials, Schubert explained that the art was “quite dry in concept,” and she felt compelled to go beyond that—to work with actual decaying matter as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.

One of her works from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her stripping a hundred roses of their petals, weaving the stems in circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When Crowley came across the work while preparing for the exhibition, it still retained its strength – the leaves and petals now completely dried but miraculously intact. “You can still smell the roses,” he marvels. “The color is still there.”

“I always want to be mysterious, and not reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided to Kovach during one of their filmed conversations in her final year. Mystery was her way. Kovac learned that she sometimes displayed fake works while hiding the originals under her bed. She destroyed some of the drawings, leaving only signed copies in their place. Although her work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale and the Sydney Biennale in 1982, and celebrated as the “First Lady of the Croatian avant-garde”, she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside Yugoslavia. Muzeum Susch is her first major solo exhibition outside Croatia.

Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav wars brought violence to Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages, pasting newspaper images and text directly onto the canvas, copying and enlarging them, then painting the whole thing in acrylics—black bars resembling barcodes, geometric shapes obscuring the images beneath them. One work depicts the Siege of Vukovar, the devastation of that city partially obscured by a decoration resembling black painted piano keys on the surface.

“The uncertainty of that period, coupled with constant reports of devastation and loss, placed her in a difficult position between her artistic pursuit and the rapidly changing world around her,” her sister Marina recalls. “In some of her works, she responded by partially overshadowing wartime newspaper reports with her interventions, placing her visual language above the stark realities of the time.”

Drawing on images of war may seem like an obscuration or denial of a horrific reality, but it is also a way of slowing down the viewer, forcing them to lean in and look more closely at what may be consumed as a media spectacle. Komić points out that Schubert’s approach reflects the number of female artists who engaged in conflict—not by depicting battles or military actors, but by exploring the psychological consequences of war.

The final rooms chart Schubert’s encounter with a different kind of violence. She was diagnosed with colon cancer in 1997 and submitted an autobiography (1997-98) – Five sets of glass test tubes filled with photographs covering her childhood, travels, and artwork, anatomical drawings from medical manuals, and a self-portrait titled “Fake Smile,” in which she appears hairless from treatment. Her last installation, Horizons (2000), invited viewers to enter circular panoramas of the places she loved: Zagreb, Croatia’s Vir Island, Paris, Venice and more.

These final works feel like a protest against her medicalization—an extension of her life and memories beyond the clinical gaze she has spent decades practicing herself. After years of dissecting others, Schubert refused to be turned into a medical case. She refused further treatment, fully aware of the consequences.

As you walk through the gallery’s 12 galleries, you’ll encounter what seems like many different artists — dramatic shifts that occur every few years. Perhaps this is exactly what Schubert wanted. Even now, decades after her death, she remains elusive.