Edita Schubert lived a double life. For more than three decades, the late Croatian artist worked at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zagreb’s medical faculty, meticulously drawing dissected human bodies for surgical textbooks. In her studio, she made art that resisted every attempt at categorisation – often using the very same tools.
“She was producing these really precise, technical illustrations which were used in medical textbooks,” says David Crowley, curator of a new retrospective of Schubert’s work at Muzeum Susch, in eastern Switzerland. “She was right in the middle of that practice … She was totally unfazed about being in dissections.” Her anatomical drawings, notes Marika Kuźmicz, the museum’s curator, are still published in handbooks for medical students in Croatia today.
Dual vocation … one of Edita Schubert’s anatomical drawings, showing the surgical anatomy of head and neck. Photograph: Edita Schubert
Schubert’s dual vocation wasn’t unusual for Yugoslav artists, who rarely had access to a 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 instruments for slicing canvas, the medical tape meant for wound dressing held her perforated artworks together, and the test tubes typically reserved for laboratory samples became vessels for her autobiography.
In the early 1970s, Schubert was still working within the confines of traditional painting – meticulous, hyperrealistic still lifes in oil and acrylic of sweets (Kandit, 1973) and salt and sugar shakers (Salt and Sugar, 1973). But frustration had been building since her student days at Zagreb’s Academy of Fine Arts, where she’d been forced to paint nudes. “I had to plunge the knife into the canvas, it simply got on my nerves, that taut surface on which I had to talk about something, with my brush, what’s more,” she later told art historian Leonida Kovač, one of the few people she ever granted an interview, “I stabbed the knife into the canvas instead of the brush.”
In 1977, that urge took literal form. Schubert produced eleven large canvases, painting each one a blue monochrome before taking a medical scalpel and making hundreds of deliberate, precise cuts. She then folded back the sliced fabric to reveal its reverse, creating works she documented with forensic precision, dating each one to underscore that they were actions, even performances. In one 1977 series of photographs, entitled Self-Portrait Behind a Perforated Canvas, she pushed her face, hair, and fingers through the perforations, turning her own body into artistic material.
Kandit, 1973. Photograph: Marina Paulenka/Edita Schubert
Kovač, who became close friends with Schubert, heard the artist’s own explanation of these works. When asked about their meaning, Schubert replied: “Yes, all my art has a character of dissection … dissection like an evening nude.” For Kovač, this was a revelation – a clue from an artist who rarely explained herself.
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,” Kovač explains. “You can’t work for 35 years in the Institute of Anatomy from eight in the morning until three in the afternoon and not be influenced by what you see there.”
Edita Schubert with her artwork ‘Red Machine’, ca. 1983. Photograph: Marijan Susovski
What makes the Muzeum Susch exhibition particularly revelatory 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 – trapeziums, as they came to be known – that Yugoslav critics lumped into the fashionable neo-geo movement. But Kovač discovered the truth only years later, when cataloguing Schubert’s estate.
“I asked her, how do you produce the trapeziums?” Kovač recalls. “And she told me, it’s very simple, it’s a human face.” Those characteristic colours – what colleagues called “Schubert red” and “Schubert 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. “I realised that those two colours […] appeared at the same time,” Kovač explains. The geometric abstractions were, in fact, highly stylised human bodies – painted while she worked on anatomical illustrations by day.
In the late 70s and early 80s, Schubert’s practice took another turn. She began creating installations from branches bound with leather, collections of bone, petals, spices and ash arranged on floors. When Kovač asked why she’d shifted to such organic materials, Schubert explained that art “was completely desiccated in the concept”, and she felt compelled to transgress – to work with actual decaying material as a response to art that had metaphorically withered.
One work from 1979, 100 Roses, saw her strip a hundred roses of their petals, weaving the stems into circles on the ground with the leaves and petals arranged inside. When Crowley encountered the work while preparing the exhibition, it still held its power – the leaves and petals now completely dried out but miraculously intact.. “You can still smell the roses,” he marvels. “The colour is still there.”
‘You can still smell them’ … 100 Roses, 1979. Photograph: Edita Schubert
“I always want to be mysterious, not to reveal what I’m doing,” Schubert confided to Kovač during one of their filmed conversations in her final year. Mystery was her method. She would, Kovač learned, sometimes exhibit fake works while hiding originals under her bed. She destroyed certain drawings, leaving only signed photocopies in their place. Despite exhibiting at the Venice Biennale and Biennale of Sydney in 1982, and being celebrated as the “first lady of Croatian avant garde,” she gave almost no interviews and her work remained largely unknown outside Yugoslavia. The Muzeum Susch exhibition is her first major solo show outside Croatia.
Then came the 1990s, and the Yugoslav Wars brought violence to Zagreb itself. Schubert responded with a series of collages, pasting newspaper photographs and text directly on to board, photocopying and enlarging them, then painting over everything in acrylic – black bars resembling barcodes, geometric forms obscuring the images beneath. One work depicts the siege of Vukovar, that city’s devastation partially veiled by a motif resembling piano keys painted in black across the surface.
War Image, 1991. Photograph: Marina Paulenka/Edita Schubert
“The uncertainty of the period, together with the continuous reports of destruction and loss, placed her in a difficult position between her artistic pursuit and the rapidly changing world around her,” recalls her sister, Marina. “In some of her works, she responded by partially veiling the wartime newspaper reports through her interventions, layering her own visual language over the stark realities of the time.”
Painting over photographs of war might seem like obscuring or denying a harrowing reality, but it’s also a way of slowing down the viewer, forcing them to lean in and look closely at what might otherwise be consumed as media spectacle. Kuźmicz notes that Schubert’s approach reflects how many female artists engaged with the conflict – not by depicting battles or military actors, but by exploring war’s psychological aftermath.
The final rooms chart Schubert’s confrontation with a different kind of violence. Diagnosed with colon cancer in 1997, she made Biography (1997-98) – five groups of glass test tubes filled with photographs spanning her childhood, travels, artworks, anatomical drawings from medical manuals, and self-portraits titled Phony Smile, showing her hairless from treatment. Her last installation, Horizons (2000), invited viewers to step inside circular panoramas of places she loved: Zagreb, the Croatian island of Vir, Paris and Venice among others.
These final works feel like a protest against being medicalised – a prolongation of her life and memories beyond the clinical gaze she’d spent decades wielding herself. After years of anatomising others, Schubert refused to be reduced to a medical case. She declined further treatment, fully aware of the consequences.
Walking through the exhibition’s 12 galleries, you encounter what seems like several different artists – radical shifts occurring every few years. Perhaps that’s exactly how Schubert wanted it. Even now, decades after her death, she remains elusive.
Edita Schubert: Profusion, Muzeum Susch, Switzerland, until 17 May 2026.
