Matejka Belle was born in 1967 in Postojna. She upgraded the fundamental knowledge of art she gained at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana with work experience across the world (India, Australia, Thailand, etc.). The 1990s are considered to be the period of the beginning of her artistic career, during which time she held numerous independent and group exhibitions. Solo exhibitions gave Belle the opportunity to enter various Slovenian galleries, including the exhibition spaces of the Piran Coastal Galleries. As a participant in group exhibitions, she has frequently exhibited outside Slovenia (Austria, Germany, Spain, etc.) and her participation in art colonies and sculpture symposia at home and abroad should be especially noted (Slovenia, Kenya, Romania). She lives and works in Kopriva in the Kras region.
Matejka Belle remains one of the few Slovenian artists who search for the contemporary interpretation of stone in the language of fine art distinctly associated with the author. A large part of her opus of small sculptures was created in the grey and black stone material from the Kras region of Slovenia. She took the processing of the “softer” white Istrian stone in a bigger format as a challenge, in which she knew how to retain the elements of her own expressive language. The sculpture is composed of two parts: on a base shaped like an open book, rests a round stone plate of irregular form. The biomorphic sculpture of organic origin is simultaneously closed and open, firm and excitingly animated, by which the author expresses the playful enchantment with nature’s biological processes. The undulation of the roughly cut stone ring arches out in its core into a small polyp. Its shape and smoothly polished surface do not conceal its equivocal sensual nature.
