(Image credit to Andy Romer Photography)
CICA Vancouver is delighted to present roundabout, a solo exhibition by New York-based, German-born Croatian artist Marin Majić, on view from April 26 to June 14, 2025, with an Opening Reception on Friday, April 25, from 6 to 8 pm.
CICA Vancouver is honoured to present roundabout, the first Canadian exhibition by New York–based, German-born Croatian artist Marin Majić. On view from April 26 to June 14, 2025, the exhibition features works made between 2022 and 2025, inviting viewers into Majić’s evocative world. Across these paintings, Roundabout conjures a realm suspended between memory and immediacy, dream and waking life—a space that slowly dissolves into soft veils of light and time.
Majić’s paintings start out as vibrant drawings in coloured pencil on linen canvas. These rich underlayers are then painted over with a diaphanous mixture of oil paint and marble dust, creating a milky haze that softens the surface and imbues each image with an ephemeral quality. Into this opacity, Majić reenters the work, drawing and brushing the surface to reveal fragments of colour beneath. The act is both additive and subtractive, as each gesture negotiates the slow logic of the drying medium.
Through this restrained and deliberate technique, Majić cultivates an atmosphere of tension and intimacy. Certain elements are rendered with striking clarity and light, while others remain enigmatic, blurred, or half-forgotten. Figures and landscapes emerge not as concrete representations, but as memories—flickering into focus and fading again, as if recalled rather than seen.
Though deeply personal, Majić’s paintings speak to shared experiences of vulnerability, memory, and the rhythms of daily life. They reflect both his individual journey and a broader narrative of displacement—a psychological terrain shaped by longing, dislocation, and the quiet weight of otherness. His characters often seem suspended in liminal states of waiting or wondering: standing apart, turning away, or gently drifting toward one another, caught between moments of hesitation, observation, and reverie. They carry within an ambivalence—a tension between the mundane and the menacing, between intimacy and estrangement.
Within these intimate dioramas, human and humanized forms inhabit scenes of charged stillness. They evoke our primal yearning for connection, yet reveal its fraught counterpart: the inevitable distance between selves, between viewer and subject, figure and reflection. There is an archaic intimacy in their gestures, yet there is a haunting awareness of the space that separates them—from one another, from themselves, from us. At times, this manifests as a quiet fragility; at others, as a subtle, even toxic, interdependence.
This body of work forms part of an ongoing series in which Majić—and his proxies—stand as witnesses to time. These paintings do not function as illustrations of the visible world, but rather expressions of lived experience. They are quiet meditations on being-in-the-world, where time unfolds not in seconds, but shifts of light, movement, and presence. They do not tell stories; they hold moments—moments where past and future coexist, where memory becomes sensation.
About the Artist
Marin Majić’s (b. 1979) powerfully atmospheric paintings distill moments of narrative friction within his dreamlike, imagined world. Through the dark leaves of Majić’s verdant environments, figures appear in a series of entanglements concerning themes such as intimacy, isolation, and power. They find themselves in each other’s grips or in the large palm of the natural world, imbuing each painting with an implied story. But plot never crystallizes into something beyond mere implication, as Majić’s subjects remain inaccessible to us: they are often portrayed with eyes closed, or with heads turned away from the viewer. Moreover, they are rendered with stark shadows and texture, making their forms blend in with their surroundings.
Majić’s color palette, produced with marble dust, oil, wax, and turpentine, is dominated by the various shades between green and grey. He employs colored pencils to add color and texture to his canvases, which have a heavily worked, grooved surface. To accentuate focal points within the compositions, Majić harnesses the warm, bright hues of firelight and the cool blues of water. Parts of each landscape – trees, water, grass – are represented with a fluidity that recalls the visual imprecision of distant memory or dreams. Overall, the mediating hand of the artist is strong, producing an uncanny Romanticism that emphasizes the impermanence of human life and the distortions produced by representation.
Marin Majić (b. 1979, Frankfurt, DE; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, US) studied at the Academy of Visual Arts, Zagreb, Croatia. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Galerie Isa, Mumbai; Marc Straus Gallery, New York; and ARNDT Fine Art, Berlin. Majić’s paintings have also been included in group exhibitions organized by Mana Contemporary, Jersey City; the Knoxville Museum of Art; and the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, NY.
Click here to RSVP for the opening reception.
This exhibition is made possible by the unwavering support of Megan Mulrooney Gallery, the Paradox Hotel Vancouver and Nino Mier Gallery.
