Maja Ruznic

Maja Ruznic (born 1983) is a Bosnian-born American painter. Her painting practice fuses abstraction and figuration, and is informed by her own experiences of the Bosnian War as well as Slavic folklore and shamanism, Jungian psychoanalysis, and the concepts related to sacred geometry.

Life and work
Born in the former Yugoslavia in 1983, the artist relocated to the United States in 1995 in the wake of the Bosnian War. Between 1992 and 1995, Ruznic and her family moved between several refugee camps before finally settling in San Francisco. She earned her B.F.A. from the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, and later an M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts in 2009. Ruznic's work as a painter is influenced by her memories of the Bosnian conflict, a passion for documenting personal narratives, and interests in Jungian psychoanalysis, mythology, and the esoteric, particularly in reference to Slavic folklore and shamanism, as well as sacred geometry.

Ruznic concentrates on portraying memories, myths, and traumas from the past through both large-scale oil paintings created with thin washes of paint and smaller gouache works. Ruznic's visual vocabulary blends figuration with abstraction, adopting a style that loosely aligns with Surrealist traditions. Her work has been interpreted as having roots in both Symbolist tendencies and Magic Realism tradition in Europe.

Her work is included in permanent collections of several American museums, including the Portland Art Museum, Dallas Museum of Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art among others. Ruznic lives and works in New Mexico. She was among the seventy-one artists selected to participate in the 2024 edition of the Whitney Biennial.