Maja Ruznic describes her works on paper as “portals,” apertures inviting each the artist and the viewer into her fantastical worlds of morphing shapes, chimerical figures, and saturated colour. Painted with acrylic-based gouache on uncooked Khadi paper, these works are a necessary a part of the artist’s apply: working small at first of every day within the studio permits Ruznic the liberty to summon new pictures from her unconscious. The primary exhibition devoted solely to this important element of her oeuvre, Srklet—titled after a Bosnian phrase that describes a psychological ache or discomfort—presents a number of works on paper made this yr the place colour and type fuse into investigations of the paranormal, the emotional, and the historic.
Ruznic’s compositions delight within the slippages between the figural and the summary. Abutting geometrical types remodel into allegorical characters, as in The Face of Western Logic (all works 2025), the place a set of smoldering eyes transforms a pinwheel of colours into the disgruntled visage of logocentric pondering. The artist made Mary Magdalene, The Alchemical Female whereas researching Christian iconography to organize for her site-responsive set up in an auditorium named for St. Francis of Assisi as a part of SITE SANTE FE’s twelfth Worldwide, curated by Cecilia Alemani and on view via the top of the yr. In Mary Magdalene, a stately lady emerges from a morass of sizzling oranges and pinks like a missive despatched from some matriarchal realm. Even when figures aren’t actually depicted, Ruznic’s proliferating types invite pareidolia, or the tendency to understand recognizable pictures in summary visible phenomena.
As together with her oil work, Ruznic builds her gouaches in layers. Artwork historian Ara Osterweil credit the “temporal density” of those works on paper to this means of accretion. For Ruznic, this density can also be associated to her private historical past. She first started portray as a baby, utilizing watercolors her mom managed to obtain whereas the household was dwelling in a refugee camp after fleeing the Bosnian genocide. Historical past, each private and political, is rarely removed from Ruznic’s thoughts. In Klimt-esque yellows, reds, and blacks, Delusion Makers illustrates the method by which myths shapeshift and unfold as a recreation of phone: figures nestled in opposition to one another whisper to these in entrance of them, taking the kernel of a narrative and rising it right into a symbolic narrative. The Numen is Not Out There, It Sits Within You envisions a flip away from the exterior world, each previous and current, and towards the self. One determine factors to a glowing pink chakra within the abdomen of one other; like shattered glass, the types that delineate the figures overlap with and multiply outward into the protagonists’ setting. Ruznic’s gouaches are the method by which she equally turns inward, excavating her psyche to construct a brand new world in its picture.
