Angela Grossmann integrates into her paintings found materials that construct personal narratives, as well as provide evidence of the social restrictions and political relations of the modern world, especially as they apply to the lower strata of society.

The found materials — text, suitcases, photographs, discarded curtains, posters, letters and other items and images — do not serve to merely document memories or events, but make a formal contribution to figure/ground elements in the work, and consequently the language of everyday life. For example, the edge of an envelope becomes the line of a shoulder; a scrap of paper delineates the space between the thighs. References to the body hold a primary position within all of Grossmann's work.

As the artist writes: "I take my cues from my materials. ... I am not just painting on photos or other found materials ... the combination is very considered and exact."

Grossmann's paintings are often serialized through figurative references to groups that are vulnerable or marginalized within society. For example, Grossmann's paintings have included criminals, nurses and orphans. Usually culled from the lower strata of society (this marginalization is also emphasized through androgynous figures), these individuals are provided with identities that incorporate a specific time and place through the integration, scraping and layering of paint and found objects. This process is ontological, rather than pure documentary; its fragmentation of form and content is close to the everyday experiences of life itself.

The images in Grossmann's series "Swimmers" combine somber colours of oil paint with found objects - chiefly letters, envelopes and stamps. These paintings, most on mylar, and other works on paper and canvas, evoke a strong emotional response to the human condition: the essence of an experience, but equally external restrictions. The figures seem to "swim" through history; this process is laboured, yet poetic.

Making art out of used objects, viewed as traces of individual lives gone by has a long tradition within modernist practice. As these objects become debris - used, fragmented, discarded, they infuse deep emotion and signify the reality of the human condition in the work.