Marin Majić | roundabout

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Marin Majić, “Smoking crowded,” 2025

colored pencil, oil color, and marble dust on linen, 16 in x 20 in (courtesy of the Gallery)

Opening Reception | April 25, 2025, 6 – 8 PM | RSVP

CICA Vancouver is honoured to present roundabout, the first Canadian exhibition by New York–based, German-born Croatian artist Marin Majić. 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.

Exhibition Walkthrough with Marin Majić | April 26, 2025, 4 – 5:30 PM | RSVP