Lobby of the Lost
A love letter to and analysis of Foyer by Marin Majić, written by Beverly Tomov
Marin Majic, Foyer, 2010, Oil on canvas, 70 9/10 x 90 3/5 inches, Knoxville Museum of Art
DISARMING
The Knoxville Museum of Art’s collection is particularly focused on the art history of East Tennessee from the mid-19th century to the present, but also prioritizes recent developments in international contemporary art.
Visit after visit, one piece in their permanent contemporary collection draws me in. Foyer (2010), a key work by Marin Majić, is a salient painting in the KMA’s collection. The work offers Knoxvillians and visitors a rare glimpse into the haunting intersections of narrative and atmosphere that define his art. As a cultural touchstone, its presence in Knoxville enriches the local arts scene, connecting the city to an international dialogue in contemporary painting.
For Majić, a Frankfurt-born artist (b. 1979) who studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Zagreb and now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, this work encapsulates his signature exploration of subjects residing in environments that mirror their own narrative opacity. Foyer draws viewers into its charged contradictions, resonating with the museum’s mission to present art that both challenges and inspires, while affirming Knoxville’s role as a hub for thought-provoking cultural expression.
Marin Majić’s Foyer (2010) is an excavation of the contradictions embedded in the everyday—a disarming study of the ordinary, staged to reveal its latent absurdities.
We’re offered a gleaming, well-appointed lobby that feels, at first glance, like a place of refuge or transit. Yet this is a room where the air feels thin, the exit unreachable, and the familiar becomes tainted with strangeness. Majić has constructed a scene that is open but airless, luminescent but unsettling—a space both inviting and deeply inhospitable.
A full third of the canvas is consumed by the ceiling, a grand, grid-like spread of geometric lights. It might be a nod to a mid-century vision of opulence, but it lands with a disturbing dissonance. The lights are dazzling yet deadening, casting a glow that’s all surface, as if Majić has conjured a synthetic sky, frozen and unfeeling. The light dances on the polished floor, but instead of warmth, it generates an icy glamor—
—a paradoxical brightness that leaves us feeling shut out, as if under the gaze of a thousand indifferent eyes.
The floor beneath is another brilliant contradiction. Its hyper-glossy tiles suggest cleanliness and clarity, but their slickness feels precarious. They are too perfect, too reflective—a trap for the unwary.
SHADOW OF REALITY
At the room’s heart lies a folk art rug, a relic of some lost culture, its vibrant figures flattened into the weave. It’s both a nod to heritage and a mockery of it, the rug’s festive dancers reduced to inert decor, a cheerful relic made eerily inert. The clash between this handmade, intimate artifact and its polished, soulless surroundings is palpable. Majić invites us to consider the absurdity of this clash:
tradition smothered under modern surfaces, a dance frozen in time.
Standing sentinel are a hare and a rubber plant, both of dubious reality. The hare could be a taxidermy trophy or a living presence—its gaze is unsettlingly lifelike, but its stillness suggests otherwise. The plant, likely plastic, parodies vitality, its glossy leaves as artificial as the floor that reflects them. Together, they stage a silent, surreal conversation about what is real and what is merely the shadow of reality. Majić turns them into emissaries of an uncanny domesticity—a hare that’s not quite dead, a plant that’s not quite alive. It’s a kind of visual prank, and yet it cuts deep, laying bare our uneasy relationship with the objects we surround ourselves with.
HOSPITABLE ABSURDITY
The oversized cupcakes on the table add another layer of absurdity. Are they a gesture of hospitality, or a joke on the idea of comfort? Their scale is ludicrous, almost grotesque, as if pulled from a child’s fantasy but left to sour in the adult world. They are comically out of place, an offering that suggests abundance but rings hollow, like a party where everyone has already left.
Your eye might land next on the closed doors—sealed tight, without handles, denying us any escape. Or perhaps it’s the racecar driver in the painting within the painting that catches your attention. He is trapped twice over: first by his helmet, a mask of white that hides his face, and then by the frame that imprisons him. He is juxtaposed with the cigarette vending machine—a relic of an era when pleasure was boxed and sold—creating a visual dialogue between two forms of entrapment. The driver’s mask and the machine’s design play on light and dark, inside and outside, a clever visual echo that underscores the painting’s theme of being caught in a loop.
Majić’s palette glows with warmth—amber light, golden tones—but the effect is far from comforting. The colors deceive, lulling us into a false sense of security before the coldness of the room’s content sinks in. It’s the warmth of a space heater in a frigid room: fleeting, surface-level, and entirely artificial. This discrepancy between the visual appeal and the emotional reality of the scene is what gives the painting its eerie power. We want to feel at ease, but the deeper we look, the more the room’s uncanny emptiness becomes apparent.
The genius of Foyer lies in its embrace of contradiction.
〰️
The genius of Foyer lies in its embrace of contradiction. 〰️
The genius of Foyer lies in its embrace of contradiction. Majić suspends us in a space where everything familiar feels slightly off—where comfort masks discomfort, where luxury feels like a trap. It’s a painting that asks us to sit with our own ambivalence, to tolerate the incoherence of a world that insists on being both bright and bleak, inviting and inhospitable.
We linger in this beautiful, barren lobby, caught in the allure of its surfaces, left searching for a door that isn’t there.
beverly tomov.
Majic’s recent works, stylistically divergent, but tonally relevant:
