Cosondra Sjostrom and Hans Hofmann: Push and Pull in Energy and Human Consciousness

Hans Hofmann, both master painter and influential teacher, articulated the concept of “push and pull,” the dynamic spatial tension created when color, shape, and texture advance and recede across the picture plane. His work celebrated the physicality of paint and the belief that a painting could function as a living organism energized through relationships of color, form, and movement.

Sjostrom clearly inherits and activates Hofmann’s lessons. The thick impasto, overlapping planes, scraped passages, and chromatic tensions in her paintings demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of how color and surface generate depth, energy, and visual movement. Her recurring rectangular structures create dynamic spatial relationships that echo the architectural clarity and formal rigor Hofmann championed.

Yet the distinction is fundamental. While Hofmann explored the dynamics of paint itself, Sjostrom explores the dynamics of human consciousness through paint. The tensions embedded within her surfaces are not merely formal interactions of color and shape; they emerge from memory, identity, emotional experience, and psychological presence. Push and pull becomes more than a visual phenomenon, it becomes a reflection of the internal forces that shape a human life.

In Sjostrom’s Existential Abstraction, formal structure and psychological inquiry become inseparable. The rectangle functions as both compositional anchor and symbolic threshold between the personal and the universal. Through layers that are built, excavated, and reconstructed, each painting transforms individual experience into a shared human resonance.

By extending Hofmann’s structural intelligence into the realm of psychological presence, Sjostrom advances a contemporary vision of abstraction where the canvas becomes not only a field of visual energy, but a map of human consciousness itself.