Glass Sculptures

Maria Sandström’s sculptural practice in glass expands her investigation into the instability of identity and the performative nature of the self. In her most recent series, Twisted Sisters—which includes works such as Dolly, Eartha, and Florence—the luminous and fragile medium of hand-blown glass becomes a vessel for paradox. These figures embody a tension between resilience and vulnerability, humor and melancholy, surface play and underlying seriousness. Through them, Sandström renders identity as both precarious and excessive, a construct that flickers between sincerity and parody.

Her earlier series Board of Directors (first presented in the 2022 exhibition Naked Ape) was realized in collaboration with the master glassblowers of the renowned Orrefors Glass Kingdom. Comprising five busts of distinctly anthropomorphic monkeys—wryly named after the most statistically common first names among Swedish corporate board members: Anders, Lars, Peter, Janne, and Johan—the work stages a biting critique of patriarchal structures of power. Each comically severe expression destabilizes the gravitas of institutional authority, exposing its rituals as absurd theatre. What emerges is a satire of the corporate archetype, where glass, with its deceptive strength and fragility, mirrors the precarious legitimacy of power itself.

Together, Twisted Sisters and Board of Directors mark a significant trajectory in Sandström’s oeuvre: glass as both metaphor and medium, a material through which identity is refracted, distorted, and laid bare