Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: if you are still looking for a figurative painting that merely looks gently at you from its white wall, move along. Maja Ruznic is not here to flatter your need for visual comfort. This New Mexico-based artist constructs worlds where figures dissolve, where colors breathe like living organisms, and where each canvas acts as a portal to psychic territories most of us would prefer to leave unexplored. Her diluted oil paintings simultaneously evoke the terrors of war, the mysteries of Slavic shamanism, and that particular melancholy that grips those who have experienced uprooting. Exhibited at the 2024 Whitney Biennial and present in the collections of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the MoMA in San Francisco, and the Whitney Museum, Ruznic is establishing herself today as an essential voice in contemporary painting.
Active Imagination: Dialoguing with Inner Ghosts
What strikes first about Ruznic is her method. The artist does not work from sketches or photographs. She pours diluted paint on the canvas and waits. She watches the stains dry for hours until shapes emerge from the chromatic chaos. This approach finds its theoretical grounding in a concept developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung between 1913 and 1916: active imagination [1]. Jung defined this method as a process allowing the conscious and unconscious to communicate, a meditation technique where unconscious contents translate into images or personify as distinct entities.
Ruznic explicitly practices this technique in her creative process. She explains that she does a lot of active imagination, this method developed by Jung which consists in observing images arise in the body and letting them lead the way [2]. This statement directly situates Ruznic’s pictorial practice in a psychoanalytic tradition where painting becomes a tool for exploring the unconscious. Each canvas functions as a therapeutic session, a confrontation with what Jung called the shadow.
The figures populating Ruznic’s paintings are not portraits in the classical sense. They are archetypes, manifestations of deep psychic forces. In The Arrival of Wild Gods (2022), a monumental triptych, one observes humanoid forms that seem to emerge from a violet and green amniotic fluid. These figures do not have defined features. They float in an indeterminate space, as if waiting for our gaze to give them shape. It is precisely here that the power of active imagination resides: it does not impose fixed meaning. It invites the viewer to project their own unconscious contents onto the canvas.
Ruznic’s approach differs radically from traditional figurative representation. Her recurring characters, the man with the mustache who evokes the father she never knew, the sunflower representing her mother, and the figure with the deformed foot embodying the artist herself, are not individuals but psychic constellations. They appear, transform, merge, and separate throughout the canvases, mimicking the dynamics of the unconscious itself.
The painting technique reinforces this psychological dimension. By massively diluting her paint with linseed oil and wax, Ruznic creates translucent layers that reveal the raw linen weave beneath. This transparency materializes Jung’s idea that the unconscious constantly surfaces beneath the level of consciousness. One literally sees through the forms, as if the figures were never fully present, always appearing or disappearing.
In The Helpers II (2023-24), a work dominated by deep greens and aquatic purples, a dozen facial profiles surround a female figure with outstretched arms. Above her hovers a shape that might be a chandelier or an inverted head with long hair. This composition evokes rituals of intercession between the material and spiritual worlds. The helpers of the title are not angels in the Christian sense but protective figures from older cosmologies, entities that Jung would have identified as projections of the archetype of the self.
Ruznic’s daily practice itself resembles a shamanic ritual. She begins her days with one to two hours of hiking in the New Mexico desert, oxygenating her body. She then practices brief meditations and active imagination sessions. Only after this preparatory work does she tackle the large canvases. Active imagination requires a particular state of consciousness, neither fully awake nor asleep, a state of controlled dreaming. The long hours Ruznic spends simply looking at her works in progress are an integral part of this process.
This therapeutic dimension explains why so many people cry in front of Ruznic’s canvases. During her exhibition at the Harwood Museum in 2021, several visitors reported intense emotional reactions. These tears testify to recognition, a meeting with psychic contents that viewers carry within themselves unknowingly. Active imagination works: it makes the invisible visible, personifies the impersonal, and gives form to inner chaos.
The Breath of Color: Inheriting Rothko
If Jung’s active imagination provides the method, it is Mark Rothko who gives Ruznic her fundamental pictorial language. Ruznic recounts having seen a Rothko room at the Tate Modern, an experience that deeply marked her. What she saw that day was the raw linen weave through thin layers of paint [3]. This vision changed her practice forever. She decided never again to overload her canvases with pigment, because excess paint hides the breathing of the support.
This notion of breathing is crucial. For Rothko as for Ruznic, the canvas is not a mere inert support. It is a living organism. When one can see the fabric’s weave, the paint seems to breathe with the viewer. Rothko wanted his paintings hung at eye level, in soft light, close to the viewer. He sought the total enveloping of the visual field. Ruznic pursues this same ambition but adds a figurative dimension that Rothko had abandoned in 1947.
Color Field painting, a movement of which Rothko was one of the pioneers alongside Barnett Newman and Clyfford Still in the 1950s, was based on vast expanses of pure color creating uninterrupted planes [4]. These painters refused to allow color to represent recognizable objects: it became the content of the painting itself, its sole reason for being. Ruznic makes a bold synthesis between Color Field and figuration. Her backgrounds function like Rothko’s fields, atmospheric expanses of saturated color that seem to pulse with their own energy. But unlike Rothko, she brings forth quasi-human forms from these fields.
In Azmira & Maja (2023-24), a monumental canvas measuring 230 by 180 centimeters now in the collection of the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, a mother and child stand in front of a hazy yellow-green landscape. The background is not a mere set. It is an emotional presence as strong as the two human figures. This particular green evokes for Ruznic Bosnia, her native country which she fled at the age of nine during the war.
Color for Ruznic works as a personal symbolic system. Each hue represents a place, a person, a state of mind. Ultramarine blue mixed with titanium white and cobalt blue creates a psychic opening for her. Green and yellow take her back to Bosnia, to the mint green house of her childhood. These associations are rooted in bodily memory. Color acts directly on the viewer’s nervous system, bypassing the intellect to touch something older and deeper.
Rothko himself insisted on the emotional dimension of his work. He was not interested in relationships between colors or forms but solely in the expression of fundamental human emotions. Ruznic shares exactly this conviction. Her paintings are not formal exercises. They are emotional portals. The difference is that whereas Rothko came to see all figuration as an obstacle to pure emotion, Ruznic believes that the spectral and semi-abstract figures she summons can carry as much emotional charge as Rothko’s floating rectangles.
In The Child’s Throat (2024), Ruznic juxtaposes warm browns, lush greens, and an electric blue that evokes lasers cutting through a jungle. The elongated figures, pressed against each other, superficially recall Gustav Klimt. But where Klimt decorated, Ruznic unsettles. At the center of the composition is a child figure with her head thrown back, surrounded by gangly ghosts. It is an image of sacrifice, of absolute vulnerability. The stroke of genius is that these magnificent chromatic harmonies serve a deeply disturbing emotional content.
Towards Threshold Painting
One fact becomes obvious when examining the work of Maja Ruznic: we are facing an artist who has accomplished what few contemporary painters even dare to attempt. She has created a visual language that honors great modernist traditions while surpassing them, that takes seriously the therapeutic and spiritual dimension of art without descending into empty mysticism, and that embraces figuration without renouncing the achievements of abstraction.
The synthesis that Ruznic achieves between Jung’s active imagination and Rothko’s legacy is not an eclectic collage of intellectual references. It is a vital necessity. For an artist who has experienced war, exile, and uprooting, who lived in Austrian refugee camps between the ages of nine and twelve, painting cannot be a mere formal game. It must be a language of survival, a way to process things for which she had no words. Active imagination provides her with the method to dive into these traumatic zones without drowning. Rothko’s lesson gives her the means to translate these dives into visual experiences that directly touch the viewer’s nervous system.
What makes Ruznic’s work particularly relevant today is that it refuses the ease of direct political engagement while remaining profoundly political. Her paintings do not explicitly denounce the war in Bosnia. They do not illustrate the horrors of forced displacement. On the contrary, they immerse us in the psychic state of trauma, loss, broken memory. And paradoxically, it is this oblique approach that makes the experience universally accessible. Her ghosts are not only those of the Balkan wars. They are the ghosts that we all carry: our departed parents, our fragmented identities, our broken hopes, and our childhood fears.
Ruznic’s decision to settle in the New Mexico desert in 2017 retrospectively appears as an aesthetic and existential choice of remarkable accuracy. This arid landscape, with its luminous intensity, its vegetal harshness, its complex history of colonial violence and indigenous resilience, offers the geographical equivalent of her artistic project. It is a land of thresholds, a liminal space where the boundaries between life and death, visible and invisible, material and spiritual diminish. Ruznic paints thresholds. Her figures inhabit in-betweens. They are neither completely abstract nor entirely figurative. They are neither alive nor dead. They are in that intermediate state that anthropologists call liminality.
If her figures remain blurry, if their contours dissolve, it is because she paints the very texture of memory and the unconscious. Traumatic memories are never clear. They return in fragments, diffuse sensations, colors, and moods rather than coherent narratives. Ruznic’s aesthetics is an epistemology of trauma, a theory of knowledge adapted to what cannot be clearly known but only vaguely felt.
In our era saturated with images, where every second produces thousands of sharp and precise photographs, where medical imaging can map every millimeter of our bodies, where digital surveillance claims to see and record everything, Ruznic’s hazy and uncertain painting constitutes an act of aesthetic resistance. It asserts that there are realities that high definition cannot capture, truths that only the technique of the “drunken hand” can approach.
The future will tell if Maja Ruznic will join the pantheon of great painters of the 21st century. But what really matters is that she has already accomplished something essential. She has demonstrated that painting can still be a tool of authentic psychic exploration, a bridge between the dead and the living, between the conscious and the unconscious, between historical catastrophe and the possibility of redemption. In a world driven by superficiality and instantaneity, Maja Ruznic offers us images that demand time, that reward prolonged contemplation, that deepen instead of exhausting. That is already a considerable victory.
- Carl Gustav Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 8: The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche, Princeton University Press ; Barbara Hannah, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C.G. Jung, Chiron Publications, 1981.
- Maja Ruznic, interview with The Creative Independent, 2025.
- Maja Ruznic, quoted in Claudia Cheng, “The Art of Maja Ruznic, Motherhood, and Meditation”, 2020.
- Irving Sandler, Abstract Expressionism: The Triumph of American Painting, Harper & Row, 1970.
