ABOUT MAJA RUCNIC
Maja Ruznic (b. 1983 Bosnia & Hercegovina) immigrated to the United States in 1995, settling in California. When the war in Bosnia started in 1992, Ruznic and her mother fled immediately, living in refugee camps in Austria until they eventually arrived in San Francisco in 1995. She went on to study at the University of California, Berkley (2005), later receiving an MFA from the California College of Arts (2009). Ruznic currently lives and works in New Mexico, USA. Ruznic is predominantly a painter, drawing on personal and collective memories to create works that deeply connect with human psyche. Allowing for figures to emerge from the thin layers of oil paint she applies to the canvas, the characters seemingly coalesce with their environments. 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 – scumbling, blurring and allowing shapes to bleed into one another – symbolically destabilizing borders. Playing with ambiguity, the paintings lie on the threshold of form, which Ruznic compares to a thought or a feeling that precedes language. She looks to evoke transitional moments, like dawn and dusk, containing illuminating and eternal qualities. This timelessness permeates the paintings, tracing journeys and rituals, histories and secrets. Nostalgic and empathetic, the works ultimately speak of human experience. Ruznic has exhibited internationally and her work has been written about extensively, most notably in Artforum, ArtMaze Magazine, Juxtapoz, San Francisco Bay Guardian, Studio Visit Magazine, and twice in New American Paintings. In 2018, Ruznic was a recipient of the Hopper Prize. In 2019, Dallas Museum of Art, TX, USA and The US Embassy in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina acquired her work for their collections. In 2021, Ruznic had her debut institutional show In the Silver of the Sun at The Harwood Museum of Art, Rosewell, NM, USA. Her work was also included in the group exhibition, Hi Woman! at the Museo di Palazzo Prato, Italy in 2021. She is currently participating in Other Worlds Than This at Nasssau County Museum of Art.
EAST AND WEST; BELGIUM AND TURKEY, NINE ARTISTS, DIFFERENT COUNTRIES-CULTURES-STYLES AND ONLY ON PAPER. "I" IN THEIR OWN WORDS” EXHIBITION STARTS AT G-ART (2014)
Nine successful artists from two countries; Yasemin Senel, Yavuz Tanyeli, Arzu BaIsaran,Rafet Arslan, Ahmet Sarı, Anya-Belyat Giunta, Annabelle Guetatra, Maja Ruznic, Marie Boralevi shall meet with viewers at G-Art, exhibiting their striking designs and paperwork in cooperation with Brussels Galerie d'YS.
Art, from the times of the cave-men to our day, has helped us understand human relations through the interpretations and creativity of mankind manifesting himself over primitive drawings, eventually evolving towards sophisticated art forms, over centuries. Artsy movements, as a bridge between dream and reality are in fact acts of bonding the rational with irrational phenomenon, the real and unreal, the images and the actual entities. Shortly, we can say that art is the adventure of getting to know, transforming and creating oneself. As its consequence we observe that, one, in his struggle to transcend himself, gets to discover and proves his existence through others' medium. Especially, the figures in the art themes form and reveal their understanding and interpretation from the standpoint of their cultural circle and geographical origins and implement their ever-changing essence. From Neolithic times to our day, animal images appear both formally and conceptually as quite diverse manifestations of the artists’ psyche. Regardless of their initial "three dimensional figures over two dimensional surface" methods that are followed by the shattering of the traditional art and their replacement by modernism, they were eventually led to contemporary practices. The notion of death, even if it maintains its validity in conceptual sense, in relation to the understanding and acceptance of the aggression within, man's confrontation with his animalistic instincts is transformed, in a way, towards more realistic formats of contemporary art language compared to the traditional.
These nine artists from different background and cultures aim to present to the spectators their reality and visualizations, using their own plastic language and personal interpretations, the exposure of "human-animal" and "inhuman animal" context using the symbolic motives of the subconscious.
