Karma presents The World Doesn’t Finish, an exhibition of latest oils and gouaches by Maja Ruznic, on view via August 23, 2024, at 22 and 188 East 2nd Road. Ruznic’s unmediated, improvisational work painting alternate worlds wherein figures merge with their mutating environments. Titled after a 1990 e-book of prose poetry by Charles Simic, who, like Ruznic, hails from former Yugoslavia, the brand new exhibition—gouaches at 188 East 2nd Road and large-scale oil work at 22 East 2nd Road—illustrates Ruznic’s visions of life enduring within the face of adversity. As one world is destroyed, one other begins, and with it new truths are revealed.
Shade is the start line for every of Ruznic’s compositions—via her associations of hues with specific emotions and reminiscences, she arrives at her symbolically-loaded palettes. Her gouaches, painted with luminous layers at an intimate scale on thick items of handmade Khadi paper, grow to be an encyclopedia of tones and types that she attracts on when conceptualizing her oils. As soon as Ruznic organizes these gouaches into teams by colour, concepts for immersive canvases emerge into being—as Ara Osterweil writes within the catalogue that accompanies the exhibition, “works on paper are usually not ancillary to Ruznic’s observe; they’re primordial.”
Layering gauzy passes of oil, she builds strata of reminiscences and associations into every portray. Arrival of Wild Gods II (all works 2023) is predominantly yellow, a colour Ruznic connects directly to heat and luxury and to corrosive acidity. For the artist, who fled her house nation of Bosnia together with her household to flee the genocide that started in 1992, turning into a part of the biggest exodus in Europe since World Battle II, yellow is tied emotionally to the three years she spent in an Austrian refugee camp throughout her childhood. Arrival of Wild Gods II assembles a forged of characters, drawn from her unconscious, right into a royal procession of mystic beings. The longer one seems at this work, the extra faces emerge from the marigold-and-auburn panorama, all oriented towards an unknown vacation spot. Ruznic associates the green-and-black palette of Geometry of Unhappiness together with her early childhood, spent residing in a small, mint-hued home together with her prolonged household. The figurative ft within a framing rectangle embellished with letters that spell out the names of Bosnian dishes echo the various L-shaped types that stomp across the work’s perimeter in an infinite loop that speaks to displacement’s disquieting recurrence.
The Darkish Place of Star Strains and Electrical energy captures a imaginative and prescient that got here to Ruznic within the wake of a holotropic breath workshop. Arcing traces like umbilical cords join figures throughout the phantasmagoric scene, constructing a community of linked beings. Like Simic’s poems, Ruznic’s work are each surreal and preserve glimpses of the acquainted; the free-floating physique components that populate The Darkish Place of Star Strains and Electrical energy evoke Simic’s description of how “the excessive heavens had been stuffed with little shrunken deaf ears as a substitute of stars.” The kaleidoscopic On the Different Facet completes the tetrad, using a large spectrum of colours to image one other group of entities, now engaged in a hedonistic revelry paying homage to the central panel of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Backyard of Earthly Delights (1490–1500), described by artwork historian Wilhelm Fraenger as “a feast of metamorphoses.” Within the heart of Ruznic’s portray, beneath the solar hovering alongside a horizon line, a formless couple kisses, surrounded by onlookers whose our bodies twist in ecstasy. Because the world appears, as soon as once more, to finish, Ruznic reminds us that the sting of destruction presents hope for renewal, and that trauma itself can at instances provoke transformation.