Zajec received his first instructions in sculpture from his father, Franc Ksaver Zajec. After his study in Vienna and travel through Italy he lived in Paris where he familiarized himself with the works by Auguste Rodin. Subsequently, he collaborated in Rome with the great Ivan Meštrović until the First World War, and after it he returned to Ljubljana and began teaching. Zajec’s oeuvre is fairly extensive: in addition to public monuments and tomb sculpture he also executed portraits and small-scale pieces of genre subject matter. His style shows he was eclectic: he kept to the established academic ideals.