With a background as a tailor and professional costumer, the Italian-born artist Angelo Filomeno creates glass-blown sculptures and paintings stitched with thread that speak to themes like mortality and isolation. He regularly employs imagery like insects, skeletons, and the elusive head of "the philosopher," emphasizing a sense of morbidity and fantasy. In When You Don’t See Me (Skull), a small, faded skull rests at the center of embroidered olive bags which are stretched over linen and speckled in dispersed gold mounds. In As The Lilies Among Thorns, So We Fall Like Love—one of three sculptures inspired by Albrecht Dürer 1503 engraving Coat of Arms With a Skull—the artist recreates large fragments of the engraving, such as a massive helmet that sprouts wings and flora, in his own vision. Describing his own work, Filomeno notes that he creates “very beautiful things depicting very bad psychological subject matter.”

Filomeno has had exhibitions at institutions including the Italian Cultural Institute of New York, SCAD Museum of Art, the National Academy Museum & School of Fine Arts, MoMA PS1, Katonah Museum of Art, and the Museum of Arts and Design, among many others.