Mark Bradford’s “social abstraction” builds dense, topographic surfaces from found urban materials, posters, billboards, merchant papers, and hair salon ephemera, which he layers, sands, and excavates to reveal histories of community, race, economics, and place.

Cosondra Sjostrom parallels Bradford in her commitment to physically layered, excavated surfaces that embed narrative and memory. Both artists treat the canvas as a palimpsest where history and experience accumulate and resurface. The architectural quality of her recurring rectangular motifs echoes Bradford’s grid-like and map-like structures.

Where Bradford’s work engages broad social and political contexts through materials drawn from the urban environment, Sjostrom’s practice is rooted in intimate psychological excavation. Her layers arise from deep conversation, personal stories, and emotional energy rather than found ephemera. Through Psychological Abstraction and Abstract Portraiture, she transforms the inner world of a specific individual into chromatic and material form.

Bradford maps the layered structures of society. Sjostrom maps the layered structures of identity. Her rectangular forms function as both anchors and thresholds, containing personal emotional histories while allowing them to expand into shared existential resonance.

In Sjostrom’s Existential Abstraction, the intimate becomes universal without losing its rootedness in human specificity. Each painting is an abstract portrait of a psychological presence, one life transformed into a mirror through which broader human experience can be recognized.