Maria Sandström transforms the figure of the ape into a prism through which the human condition is refracted—comic, tragic, and endlessly performative. Her paintings and glass sculptures stage identity as a theatre of masks, where sincerity dissolves into parody and authority collapses into absurdity. With incisive humour and an obsessive command of colour, Sandström exposes the fragile constructions that govern both private and public life, from the intimate contradictions of the self to the inflated rituals of corporate power.

In her work, laughter is never merely laughter: it becomes a critical tool, a way of disarming pretension and opening a space where fragility and profundity coexist. Sandström reminds us that to understand the absurd is also to glimpse, however fleetingly, the truth beneath it.