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,wiht 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 rather 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 fol“`html

Edita Schubert: The Croatian Artist who Worked in Secret

For decades, Edita Schubert was a phantom of the Croatian art scene. Celebrated within Yugoslavia as a pioneer of conceptual and body art, she remained largely unkown in the west, her work hidden in private collections and her persona shrouded in deliberate mystery. now, a major retrospective at the Muzeum Susch in Switzerland is finally bringing her radical practice to international attention.

The exhibition, curated by Katerina kovač, began as a documentary project. Kovač spent three years filming Schubert in her home in Zagreb, a space crammed with artworks, books and curiosities. “She was very reluctant to talk about her work,” kovač recalls. “She didn’t want to explain it, she wanted people to feel it.”

Schubert’s early work, created in the 1960s and 70s, involved a striking juxtaposition of geometric abstraction and anatomical studies. She trained as an anatomist, producing detailed illustrations for a medical textbook used across European medical faculties. “I realised that those two colours […] appeared at the same time,” Kovač explains. The geometric abstractions were, actually, 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 fully 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 thier 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 color is still there.”

“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