Portrait Series

The Portrait Series

The Portrait Series explores the human experience through two distinct avenues of creation: personal excavations of the artist’s own inner world, and bespoke client-inspired legacy portraits created in dialogue with collectors.

• Artist Portraits: Unfiltered studio works born directly from Cosondra’s personal emotional landscapes, memory, translations, and internal archaeology in her signature motif.

• Collector-inspired Portraits: Select client-inspired slots offered each year. Each work begins with a confidential dialogue with the collector, from which Cosondra distills affective charge, biographical traces, and unspoken currents into a custom composition. All client-inspired pieces are created at 24" × 48" in acrylic in her signature motif.

Cosondra Sjostrom is an Existential Abstract painter who explores the fragile boundary between physical presence and the unseen psyche. Her Portrait Series unfolds across two distinct paths: personal explorations of her own life events and emotional turning points, alongside client-inspired pieces shaped by deep, confidential conversations with collectors.

Central to this work is her signature motif, a monolithic rectangular silhouette unveiled in 2020 as an essential physical form that grounds each piece. Serving as a structural anchor, each painting expands through her signature process of building, scraping, and excavating dense acrylic impasto. Sjostrom deliberately drives the thick paint beyond the boundary of the central rectangle, using the scraped edges to symbolize breaking free from form itself. Earlier marks ghost through translucent veils while buried colors resurface in luminous strata of gesture and hue. By keeping the surrounding canvas restrained, Sjostrom allows the central rectangle to act as a threshold where personal memory or shared dialogue, coupled with raw emotion, radiates outward to transcend its physical boundaries.

Every acquisition carries rarity,  and long-term significance. Sjostrom synthesizes the emotional depth of Color Field (Mark Rothko), the gestural vitality of Abstract Expressionism (Joan Mitchell, Hans Hofmann), the layered materiality of contemporary abstraction (Gerhard Richter, Mark Bradford). She channels these traditions into a distinctive practice of Existential Abstraction via Psychological Abstraction and Abstract Portraiture.