Deep Calls to Deep

Maja Ruznic 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."

Bosnia and Herzegovina