Bosnian artist Maja Ruznic is a New Mexico-based artist who paints diluted, out-of-focus figures and landscapes that explore nostalgia and childhood trauma and are influenced in part by war and the refugee experience. The ritualistic nature of her work reflects religious and mythological interests. For six years following her graduation from the California College of the Arts, Ruznic worked with ink and watercolor in her small San Francisco bedroom. She refers to the loose, runny style she developed as “the drunken hand.” Ruznic has since expanded this gestural approach to oil, while still bearing the influence of water-based media.
Painting variably with oils and gouache on immense and small scales alike, Ruznic extracts order from layers of diluted pigment. Ruznic’s practice is informed by her studies, from Slavic shamanism and alchemy to Jungian psychoanalysis and sacred geometry. Imbued with a discordant beauty, her compositions emerge without a premeditated outcome. Ruznic’s introspective, mystical approach places her into a lineage of visionary painters including Paul Klee and Hilma af Klint.
Ruznic paints her emotions and memories that explore identity, melancholia, and the human psyche. Born of the artist’s dream state, ethereal figures blend into one another across her vivid, abstract paintings, allowing enigmatic narratives to slowly emerge. She describes the process of painting as trying to remember a dream, touching on Bracha L. Ettinger’s theories of ‘matrixial borderspace’: the space of shared effect and emergent expression, across the thresholds of identity and memory. Ruznic deftly weaves themes of trauma and suffering with mythology and healing, softening the darker subject matter in her work. This softening is then applied to the process of painting, where blurring and allowing shapes to bleed into one another symbolically destabilizes borders. Playing with ambiguity, the paintings lie on the threshold of form, which Ruznic compares to a thought or a feeling that precedes language. Her swaths of pastel colours flood the picture plane with a translucent, spiritual rhythm.
Maja Ruznic was born in Brčko, Bosnia and Herzegovina (then called Yugoslavia), in 1983. After fleeing her home due to the Bosnian War (1992-1995), both she and her mom lived in refugee camps throughout Europe before making it to San Francisco, California in 1995. She went to school at the University of California, Berkeley, CA, and then earned an MFA from the California College of Arts, San Francisco, CA. She has exhibited nationally as well as internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Karma, Los Angeles (2023); Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque (2022); Karma, New York (2022); and Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico (2021). Ruznic’s work is held in the collections of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dallas Art Museum; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico; Jiménez–Colón Collection, Puerto Rico; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Rachofsky House, Dallas; and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ruznic’s work is in the collections of the San Francisco MoMA, San Francesco, California; He Art Museum, Foshan; Dallas Art Museum, Dallas, Texas; The Rachofsky House, Dallas, Texas; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; and the Jiménez–Colón Collection Collection, Puerto Rico. Ruznic lives in Placitas, New Mexico.