Angelo Filomeno makes sleek blown-glass objects and what he calls “embroidery paintings,” delicately embroidered macabre images on sumptuous textured fabric. The son of a blacksmith and dressmaker, he learned to sew at seven. He honed his eye as a tailor’s apprentice and by studying painting, and began his career as a designer and tailor of clothes for a couture company in Milan, and of costumes for a workshop in New York. In 2000, using a zigzag sewing machine, he created his first work of art. Informed by the untimely death of his parents, and inspired by memento mori, Matthias Grünewald, Albrecht Dürer, and Hieronymous Bosch, Filomeno claims he makes “very beautiful things depicting very bad psychological subject matter.” This includes vermin, birds, and skeletons, ghoulish subjects rendered in shining silk, alluding to hubris, mortality, and death.