Maja Ruznic (b. 1983 Bosnia & Hercegovina) received a BFA from University of California, Berkeley, CA (2005) and an MFA from California College of Arts, San Francisco, CA (2009). She currently lives and works in Roswell, New Mexico, USA.

Ruznic draws on personal and collective memories to create figurative works that deeply connect with human psyche. In her paintings, she allows 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 if trying to remember a dream. Throughout her practice, Ruznic deftly weaves themes of trauma and suffering with mythology and healing, softening the darker subject matter. Nostalgic and empathetic, her works ultimately speak of human experience.

Ruznic’s oeuvre resonates with Bracha Ettinger’s theory of ‘Matrixial Borderspace’ – a psychological dimension which acts like a veil, cradling history. A place of shared affect, beyond identity, where our personal and ancestral traumas coexist. Judith Butler writes, in her foreword to Ettinger’s first monograph, ‘the matrixial is what we guard against when we shore up the claims of identity, when we presume that to recognize each other is to know, to name, to distinguish, according to the laws of identity’ (2006). In this sense, Ruznic thinks of the matrixial as a feminine, pre-moral, pre-verbal arena in which she allows the characters of her work to dwell. The works investigate what it is we all have in common, rather than what sets us apart.