Review: Medici Museum show of Dragana Crnjak’s landscape paintings is a breakout success

Arts & Culture Steven Litt Covering art, architecture and economic development across Northeast Ohio with news stories, analysis and reviews. Review: Medici Museum show of Dragana Crnjak’s landscape paintings is a breakout success Ideastream Public Media | By Steven Litt Published November 9, 2026 at 3:00 PM EST Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Steven Litt / Ideastream Public Media Veteran artist Dragana Crnjak , a native of Bosnia and Herzegovina and a professor at Youngstown State University, is tugging Ohio’s artistic center of gravity toward the Mahoning Valley. Crnjak’s work over the past decade includes abstract landscapes that look as if they were glimpsed from a space probe zooming over rocky terrain on remote, icy planets. She has earned four Individual Excellence awards from the Ohio Arts Council and had solo shows at galleries across Virginia, Ohio, New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Boston and in her Balkan homeland. Now she’s having a breakout moment. Her newest solo exhibition, on view through Jan. 4 at the Medici Museum of Art in Warren, sums up her previous work and leaps forward, in a sense, by coming down to Earth, embracing color and exploring nature close at hand. The show is outstanding, which makes it important cultural news in a season dominated by high-profile exhibitions at the Cleveland Museum of Art and other venues across the state. Titled “Forest,’’ the exhibition debuts 15 abstract landscapes made over the past two-and-a-half years that were inspired by strolls in Youngstown’s 2,700-acre Mill Creek Park. Crnjak (pronounced Sern-yak) brings a camera on her walks, snapping photos to capture impressions of light and color. “I have hundreds and hundreds of those images,’’ the artist said in a recent conversation. “I look through them and then something really stops me. Those are the initial references.” In the woods In contrast to her earlier evocations of high-velocity flight, Crnjak’s new paintings suggest intimate views of leafy canopies penetrated by light from distant clearings. Silhouetted shapes in the foreground bring to mind trees, leaves, branches and understory plants, although her shadowy forms refuse to come into focus. It’s hard to tell what’s near and what’s far. This spatial ambiguity holds a viewer’s attention by inviting the mind’s eye to complete that which is only hinted or implied. Crnjak, who paints in tempera layered with transparent glazes in acrylic, accents her muted veils of light and shadow with razor-sharp stripes, elongated lozenge shapes or tile-sized confetti flecks of jewel-toned color. Steven Litt / Ideastream Public Media These eye-catching intrusions contrast and resonate dramatically with their hazily defined surroundings. They zip through Crnjak’s paintings like high-frequency electromagnetic waves or pulses, a notion that conjures Thoreau’s Walden Pond in the age of satellites and cellphones. Suggestions of speed are still occasionally apparent. “Today’s Song,’’ 2025, features horizontal bands of magenta and burnt orange superimposed on dark, scattered forms smeared horizontally like flying leaves glimpsed through the window of a speeding car. More often, Crnjak’s paintings now suggest vertical and horizontal movement in ways that balance out, creating a kind of tranquility that’s new for her. The paintings position the viewer on the ground, looking straight at nearby surroundings rather than down at vast expanses from a dizzying “Top Gun” cockpit. Dragana Crnjak In “Orchard,’’ 2026, a large canvas seven feet wide and six feet high, vertical stripes and lozenge shapes of salmon, citron and bubblegum pink float atop indeterminate shapes in autumnal hues of yellow and brown that are blurred horizontally and vertically. “Riverside,’’ 2026, painted on an equally large canvas, explores similar ideas in a cooler palette of sage and pale aquamarine. In “Warm Hour,’’ 2026, which is six feet high and just over four feet wide, the painting’s vertical orientation plants a viewer firmly in place, bathed by pale, radiant greens, soft blues and violets. It’s like sensing heat from a nearby meadow while still feeling a cool breath of shade in the woods. Under the trees Crnjak’s work is a 21 st century update on a sub-genre of landscape painting known as sous-bois , meaning “under the trees” in French. It refers to artists whose paintings focus on woodland interiors or forest floors. Examples include works by van Gogh , Courbet, Corot and Cezanne . The stripes of color in Crnjak’s paintings reference works by 20 th -century American abstractionist Barnett Newman (1905-1970), who balanced vertical “zips” against vast, unbounded voids of contrasting hues. The trembling luminosity in Crnjak’s paintings also brings to mind abstractions by the contemporary American painter Ross Bleckner (born 1949). Crnjak acknowledges those influences, along with that of Ethiopian-American artist Julie Mehretu (born in Addis Ababa in 1970), whose abstractions suggest jet-powered views of bustling cities. Yet while Crnjak interacts with tradition, she does it in her own voice, from her own viewpoint. Her work is earned, not borrowed. The perfect setting Crnjak’s paintings look terrific in the soaring interiors and soft, milky light of the Medici, built in 2001 as a branch of the Butler Institute of American Art in nearby Youngstown. The museum is a local treasure that deserves wider attention. It was designed by the Mahoning Valley architect Thomas Schroth (1922-1997) and completed after his death. The museum formally separated from the Butler in 2019. 1 of 4 — Medici Museum of Art An interior view of the main special exhibit gallery at the Medici Museum of Art in Warren, Ohio, now featuring recent paintings by Youngstown artist Dragana Crnjak. Steven Litt / Ideastream Public Media 2 of 4 — Medici Museum of Art The Medici Museum of Art in Warren, Ohio, is one of the state’s lesser-known cultural gems. Steven Litt / Ideastream Public Media 3 of 4 — Litt_2_(5).jpg The permanent collection of the Medici Museum of Art in Warren, Ohio, includes numerous works by hyperrealist sculptor Carole Feuerman including this sculpture of a bikini-clad woman in a meditative posture atop a reflective globe. Steven Litt / Ideastream Public Media 4 of 4 —  Medici Museum of Art Designed by architect Thomas Schroth, the Medici Museum of Art in Warren features interior courts that distribute daylight into passageways and galleries. Steven Litt / Ideastream Public Media Schroth was an idiosyncratic modernist who specialized in designing boxy, inwardly-focused suburban mansions for the region’s gentry. Like his other works, the Medici museum has a white, non-descript exterior that conceals soaring, light-washed interiors illuminated by skylights and interior courtyards with floor-to-ceiling windows. The museum’s collection is an eccentric mix of Op Art, geometric abstraction, scattered prints by Picasso and Lautrec and a large group of sculptures by the hyperrealist Carole Feuerman , whose portrayals of bikini-clad women are both erotic and emotionally aloof. Chinese calligraphy scrolls on loan from the Rockefeller family are also on view. Crnjak’s paintings, displayed in the museum’s main special exhibit area, have a pensive, meditative quality that seems to bloom within Schroth’s architecture. The artist’s life In addition to the artist’s focus on Ohio light and landscapes, her works embody memories of coming of age during the Bosnian civil war in 1992-95, which claimed 100,000 lives, mainly Bosnian Muslims. Born as Dragana Bozickovic in 1977 in the Bosnian town of Zenica, she grew up in Doboj, a major city and transportation hub an hour north, where her father worked as a public health doctor and her mother was a nurse. (Crnjak is the artist’s married name). She knew as a child that her paternal grandfather frustrated her father’s literary ambitions