Maria Sandström’s practice navigates the unstable terrain of identity, performance, and representation. Through her now signature ape figures—at once comic, unsettling, and profoundly human—she interrogates the gap between sincerity and parody, the authentic and the staged. These characters function less as portraits than as mirrors: exaggerated surrogates through which the complexities of the self are refracted.

Her current exhibition, Hello, is it me I’m looking for (2025), extends this inquiry into the contradictions of contemporary subjectivity. Across large-scale paintings and sculptural works, Sandström presents the self as a restless construction, forever oscillating between exposure and disguise. With her incisive humour, bold use of colour, and acute sensitivity to expression, she transforms familiar primate physiognomies into allegories of our own human condition.

Her engagement with glass as a medium has become an important dimension of this exploration. In her latest series, Twisted Sisters—featuring works such as Dolly, Eartha, and Florence—the hand-blown material’s luminous fragility becomes a metaphor for the contradictions of identity: resilient yet precarious, playful yet profound.

This builds on the earlier series Bolagsstyrelsen (Board of Directors), first exhibited in Naked Ape (2022) and crafted in collaboration with the master glassblowers of Orrefors Glass Kingdom. Comprising five busts of monkeys, each humorously named after the most common male first names among Swedish board members—Anders, Lars, Peter, Janne,and Johan—the work parodied the rituals of authority and exposed the absurd theatre of power. With their comically severe expressions, these busts destabilised the gravitas of the boardroom, while the material of glass itself underscored the paradoxes of fragility and permanence inherent in institutional structures.

Sandström’s trajectory into the art world was preceded by a career as an art director in London’s film and television industry, a background that continues to inform her sensitivity to staging, character, and mise-en-scène. She has received awards from the Royal Society of Arts and the Notting Hill Art Club, and her work has been featured on Kulturnyheterna. Her paintings and sculptures are held in collections across the UK, Australia, Los Angeles, Spain, and France. Sandström graduated with a First Class BA from the University for the Creative Arts (UCA), UK, in 2003.

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