‘I had to plunge the knife into the canvas’: Edita Schubert wielded her scalpel like other artists wield a brush

In her day job, the ‘first lady of Croatian avant garde’ sliced up cadavers at Zagreb’s anatomical institute. In her studio, she used the same medical instruments to make art that surprises to this day

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.