Maja Ruznic

Maja Ruznic, The Arrival of Wild Gods, 2022, oil on linen; in three parts, 100" × 76" (each), 100" × 228.5" (overall).

Maja Ruznic (born 1983) is a Bosnia-Herzegovina-born, New Mexico-based visual artist. She is known for introspective, color field-like paintings that merge figuration and abstraction through ghostly forms that materialize out of fluid, undefined spaces. Ruznic's work draws upon art history, personal experience, and interests in mystical belief, folklore and psychoanalytic thought. She explores themes involving spiritual transcendence, family relationships and motherhood, and the experience of shared trauma. Critic Barry Schwabsky wrote that Ruznic's compositions effect "a dreamy, quasi-symbolist vibe" in which permeable, uncertain boundaries between figures, forms and spaces convey "the idea that there are goings-on in the world that are inaccessible to a purely empirical perception." Musée d'Art Moderne de Paris, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art , and Dallas Museum of Art, among others. She has exhibited at the Aspen Art Museum, Harwood Museum of Art, Museo di Palazzo Pretorio and Roswell Museum and Art Center. She was selected to appear in the Whitney Biennial In 2024 and SITE Santa Fe in 2025.

Life and career Ruznic was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina (then Yugoslavia) in 1983.

Ruznic has had solo exhibitions at the Harwood Museum of Art (2021) and Tamarind Institute (2022),

Work and reception Ruznic's work has been characterized by critics as art-historically informed, sharing connections with pre-modernist symbolist and magical realist figuration as well as modernists such as Paul Klee and the color field painters.

Critics observe that Ruznic's loose compositions, figures and themes arise out of her exploration of materials—the physical reality of the paintings—rather than from preconceived ideas, sketches or photographs.

Bodies of work and exhibitions Ruznic's work of the 2010s was rooted in her early refugee experiences of shared trauma, displacement and loss. During that period, she produced paintings of fragmented, spectral figures and textile sculptures of disfigured, phantom-like forms that conveyed a sense of emotional and physical pain; the painted figures often engaged in cryptic rituals connected to the land or intercession between worldly and spiritual realms. Crocker Art Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA) in Finland, He Art Museum in China, Jiménez–Colón Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum, among others.