Maja Ruznic's 'Who Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak' at Contemporary Fine Arts Basel

Maja Ruznic's solo exhibition 'Who Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak' opened at Contemporary Fine Arts in Basel, coinciding with the city's 32nd Jodlerfest, a Swiss yodeling festival not hosted in Basel since 1924. The show features ten medium-to-small oil paintings created in 2026, including works like 'The Girl Who Swallowed the Wolf', 'Who Tastes Fire and Cannot Speak', 'The Making of a Gallbladder', and 'Self Portrait as Memory'. Ruznic's approach is psychological, drawing from her childhood in wartime Bosnia and her interest in Jungian analysis, treating painting as a form of active imagination. Her figures are rendered with an improvisational brush, hovering between representation and abstraction, with thin, blotchy paint layers that create a compressed, flat effect. The exhibition is presented by Contemporary Fine Arts, with galleries in Basel and Berlin, and Karma in New York. The review, published in Flash Art, reflects on the immediacy of music versus visual art, using the yodeling outside as a metaphor for Ruznic's unresolved, half-formed figures.