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 (Bosnia and Herzegovina, b. 1983) fuses personal narrative, psychoanalysis, mythology, and esoteric thought into vivid paintings that join figuration and abstraction. Painting variably with oils and gouache on immense and small scales alike, she extracts order from layers of diluted pigment. Ruznic’s practice is informed by her studies of 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 lives in Placitas, New Mexico. Recent solo exhibitions include those held at Karma (Los Angeles, 2025 and New York, 2024); Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin (2024); Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, New Mexico (2022); and Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, New Mexico (2021). Ruznic’s work is held in the collections of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, California; Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Dallas Museum of Art; EMMA – Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland; Harwood Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Ruznic was included in the 12th SITE SANTA FE International (2025–26) and the 2024 Whitney Biennial.