Liza Hribar* (1913–96) was born into a family of extraordinary women by the standards of the time – determined, independent and enterprising – and she became one herself.

Pencils and paper were her first playthings, but it was only after completing a commercial apprenticeship that she enrolled in the Probuda Art School in Ljubljana. In 1931, like her mother Elza Kastl Obereigner many years earlier, she decided to study at the Vienna Women’s Academy. As a young artist at the start of her independent artistic career she first made a name for herself among Slovenian artists when she took part in the Little Entente of Women exhibition in Ljubljana in 1938; in October of the same year she became known to a wider audience when she served as a jury member for The Child in Painting and Sculpture exhibition at the Jakopič Pavilion.

In August 1939 she married Zoran Hribar, who came from a prominent Slovenian industrialist family. Soon afterwards, the region was swept up in the turmoil of war and post-war events, including the Nagode Trial of 1947, a political show trial at which she and her husband were among the victims. These events had such a profound impact on her that we can regard them as a turning point in her life.

Liza Hribar had already established herself as a sculptor before the Second World War, but after it she had to draw on her entrepreneurial spirit and her determination, and it was these qualities that enabled her to assist in setting up a retail outlet for handicrafts. Every trace of her role in this initiative was later unjustifiably erased, but it later developed into the Dom retail chain, which was well known in Slovenia for many years. In the absence of her husband, she had to support her children and family on her own, so she gave up her artistic work. In the decades that followed she won the hearts of many Ljubljanans with her decorative brooches, wall and table lamps, candlesticks and, especially, her zodiac signs and angels – the so-called amoretti. In the final decades of her life she achieved a certain degree of renown, partly through her commissions for churches, notably her nativity scenes, which were especially popular.

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*Her baptismal certificate shows her name as Elisabeth Charlotte von Obereigner, but she was known as Lieselotte. After her marriage she signed herself Liza Hribar.