Duba Sambolec was born in 1949 in Ljubljana. In 1975 she graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Ljubljana with a degree in sculpture, and completed her postgraduate studies in sculpture under Drago Tršar in 1978. In sculpture, she has explored the pushing of its formal and traditional boundaries, which she also does through the prism of women’s issues and feminism, as apparent already in her (conditionally speaking) hyperrealist works. She has also produced multimedia installations, videos and video performances (more at: ArtFem.TV and DIVA Station), drawings, photographs and photo collages, and worked with sound. In addition to her artistic and curatorial work, her teaching career is also noteworthy. She began teaching in the 1980s when she taught art at the Secondary Technical School Litostroj in Ljubljana. Between 1992 and 2007 she was a professor of visual arts and head of the Department of Sculpture of the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. In 1998 and 1999 she taught visual arts at the National Academy of Fine Art, Oslo, Norway, and between 2008 and 2012 she taught at the Faculty of Visual Arts, Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her art has been featured in exhibitions worldwide, including the Venice Biennale (Aperto ’88) and the São Paulo Biennale, and at 37 solo exhibitions, for instance at the Student Center in Zagreb, at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb and elsewhere. For her work she has received many awards, including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant; and in 1980, the Prešeren Foundation Award for her “figurative and spatial sculpture.”
