NEW YORK, NY.- Since 2020, Jill Goldstein has been making complex and commanding embroidered works on linen. Her abstract compositions often start with a near-symmetry that is disrupted by required repairs and undulating shifts in rhythm, placing patterns against patterns and using sewn line as if drawing. The work reflects the unpredictability of life, and her grids, geometries, patterns, lace and line are dictated by the fragility of the threadbare textiles as well as intuition, spontaneity and interruption.

In one work, a lumpy seam on a bed sheet is resolved with three small stitched orange rectangles, and in other works, the irregular curve of a torn edge is juxtaposed with hard geometric triangles, like zig zag teeth. Goldstein reduces six-strand embroidery floss to single and double strands, creating variable size and density. Using brightly colored and metallic thread, she stitches over and over on the same spot, creating formal, sculptural weight, and these solid labored areas contrast with the delicacy of single strand stitches and open lacework. Sewing is an act of moving, joining and uniting things.

Cosmic circles, polka dots, stars, grids, and radiating lines align Goldstein's work with the meditative and universal qualities of tantric drawings or the rhythmic movements in Louse Bourgeois' works on paper and textiles, who described the immediacy of drawing as “thought feathers.” And yet, unlike the quick and gestural mark-making of drawing, embroidery is rooted in a physical, sculptural, material meditation. Things can be done and then quickly torn out – the process is marked by starts and stops – and this condition dictates the layering of patterns, border-making, and other strategies of containment and expansion. Each mark is small, staccato and pensive. ​​

Jill Goldstein started making intricate, labored textile works on the used linens in her home, many of which had been passed down from relatives, while raising her three children. Her works align with a history and materiality that is rooted in the domestic space, mending, and needlepoint. While she is compelled by materials that bear the evidence of use and wear, she is not interested in mending in a utilitarian sense. The works interrogate the conditions in which they are made; the invisibility of domestic labor, and the near-constant interruptions and chaos of family life, and they expressly eschew utility for another purpose. At times lyrical, or almost musical in their rhythms, Goldstein's work is located within a tradition of quiet disruption, a slowing and resistance where each stitch becomes a record of time spent.

Goldstein (b. 1971 Washington D.C.) is a self-taught artist. Her work has been included in several juried craft exhibitions and group exhibitions at White Columns and Laurel Gitlen, New York. She lives and works in New York.

Max Guy's practice has long drawn from a personal study and archive of collected imagery - a mixture of photographs and silhouettes cribbed from his personal library of art and architecture books, video games and graphic novels, as well as leaves collected on walks since 2015. The work straddles different registers of understanding and perception, and is at-times personal and political - obliquely witty and tender while interrogating art-making, humanity, violence and racism. For Esther we will show a small group of sculptures including two new masks.
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The masks I'm carving now are Pulcinella masks. Pulcinella is a character archetype from
commedia dell'arte, which is a professional improvisational theater form that emerged from the Italian High Renaissance. Pulcinella is a clown character and probably the best recognized character from this theater form. He has an exaggerated nose, and often a dramatic brow and rounded cheeks. Pulcinella is best characterized by his cunning and opportunism, which will be seen as virtuous or unbecoming depending on the scenario. He's a wise and anarchic character with a disdain of authority.

I've been spending a lot of time with Giovanni Domenica Tiepolo's not quite allegorical drawings of Pulcinelli, dropped into a variety of scenarios as a plebeian. I think about these as morepeople just going on about their lives, but there's an uncanny and nightmarish quality to Tiepolo's drawings that are hard to pinpoint other than by asking why are clowns doing all of these jobs?

These masks are carved from cedar and then dyed with a highly concentrated vinegar and steel wool mixture that turns a deep black when it mixes with the tannins in the wood.

Masks use a face to tell stories about a culture or a world. Materially and superficially they holdso much! I've been inspired by various performance traditions in which masks represent archetypes and performers embody them, not through, say, empathetic acting, but through symbolic gesture. In summer of 2022 I studied Noh Theatre with students of the Kita School – Noh has seemingly influenced a whole host of contemporary artists including Simon Starling and Joan Jonas, but it also informed the work of WB Yeats among other poets. All to say I like theatre as an embodied or highly physical form of reading. Carving masks allows me to think through topography and relief in a way my other work does not. I start with a six-sided block of wood and at least one silhouette. I'd been cutting faces out of paper for years so those often serve as the basis for my masks–drawn on its underside. Then, I start to shape a face by drawing a facial profile, the top and bottom views onto the woodblock and slowly reconciling each drawing with the other. I hoped carving would be a slow practice… to produce something qualitatively different from the loose conceptualism that's characterized my practice for years. Craft, for lack of a better term, seemed the antidote to a specific production timeline or market demand. Mostly though, I wanted to know if I could do it.

The masks are carved entirely by hand, with occasional bandsaw use, but the production tempo doesn't really slow down as expected, because I'm not constantly carving—I'm usually cutting things out of paper. Ultimately I excavate characters from the wood in a matter of weeks, or a month, or a day. Sometimes I put down a carving block for a year or two and return to it. Most of my wooden masks have been decorative, and the carving in the back is incredibly shallow. I like the idea of amassing, say, 100 on a wall like in a costume shop and having them all stare back at you. - Max Guy , Spring 2026

Max Guy (b. 1989 McAllen, TX) has had solo and two-person shows at The Renaissance Society, Good Weather, Chicago, Romance, Pittsburgh, And Now (James Cope), Dallas, Centralbanken, Oslo, and King's Leap and Laurel Gitlen, New York. His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including the Fundacja Art House, Poland; MCA Chicago; The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Jack Shainman, New York. His work is in the public collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, Morgan Stanley, and Collexione Taurisano, Napoli