Adolf Pen was born in 1944 in Slovenia. Despite receiving the Prešeren award for fine arts, he decided to study chemistry in Ljubljana. After graduating from the university, he was employed in the Biotechnical Faculty. Concurrently, he took an active role and kept educating himself in the field of fine arts, most intensely in the 1970s when he attended a school run by the academically trained painter Danijel Fugger. Besides his role models, such as the French painter Paul Cezanne and the Slovene painter Anton Gojmir Kos, Pen’s painting was heavily influenced by art historian Dr. Cene Avguštin.
From 1972 to 1980, Pen was Secretary of the Slovene Fine Arts Groups Association. During that time, he prepared a series of lectures on the physical and chemical bases of paints used in painting. Later, during the crisis in the 1980s, he even produced oil paints. Since 1980, Pen has been living and working in Murska Sobota. Since 2005, he has worked exclusively as a painter.
So far (as of October 2009), he has held over 250 group and 57 independent exhibitions (in Ljubljana, Berlin, Graz and other places in Austria and Slovenia) and received numerous awards and buy-out awards.


Art historian and art history teacher Vlado Sagadin has said of his art: “The painting credo of Adolf Pen is tied to the exceptionally strict critical and disciplined attitude in relation to both experience and creative improvisation. Three-dimensionality is sacrificed to the notion of a surface for which the painter is searching an optimum duplicate with laboratory-like persistence: the shape and form are cleared of all details which might disrupt the noble character of their colour values. There is no doubt that Pen’s paintings are particularly recognisable due to the harmonious proportions of the expressiveness of shape and colour and the fact that idea is the master of both..."