KATES-FERRI PROJECTS is thrilled to showcase artist Saskia Fleishman’s latest collections between October 9 and November 10, 2024, in SUN SIGNALS, with the opening reception on Friday, October 11, from 6:00-8:00PM.

As the Project’s first ever artist-in-resident in 2020, Fleishman is presenting her first solo exhibition with the gallery. The artist works in three main ways: acrylic paintings of abstracted landscapes with sand on digitally printed chiffon, curtains of digitally manipulated landscapes on chiffon, and ceramics with aerosolized blended mat underglaze. The works are interlinked materially and conceptually with the envelopment of nature. Grounding her abstractions in landscapes in her works, Fleishman delicately balances recognition and her focus on form and color. 

The curtain and ceramic series stem from Fleishman’s acrylic paintings. The graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design used to paint in plein-air and focused on abstraction during her schooling, especially geometric abstraction, and op art. Harking back on Claude Monet’s preoccupation with the way light changed his subjects, Fleishman applies her eye through cameras and brings her subjects back to her studio. The sand and acrylic painting overlaid on the chiffon print image in Chincoteague (August 17, 2023, 7:52pm) (2024) are only seconds apart. Fleishman inserts hard-edge geometric portals between those quiet moments to help audiences notice the subtle changes. The gesture collapses two points of time into one, forming a liminal space between them. The imperfectly aligned glistening streams rub against each other, letting viewers breathe in the land as she did before the setting sun. 

Fleishman recognizes herself as a traveler, a witness to the beauty that surrounds her. Coming from a family who works closely with the land, the artist observes the transience of the disappearing landscape of her childhood home–Chesapeake Bay. The desire to find more ways to capture the beautiful gradients in the skies and the light affecting the land led her to create the curtain series. Digitally transforming the near exact images, as in Sedona (December 16, 2021, 5:24pm) (2024), Fleishman again overlays a slice of time on top of another to form a glitch, something that does not naturally occur. The transparency of the chiffon is further highlighted in the curtains, allowing viewers to see behind it, adding more scenes to the work. The layering of time and space reflects Fleishman's deep connection to the ephemeral beauty of the natural world and her ongoing exploration of how to reimagine these fleeting instants.

While Fleishman’s curtains expand on the chiffon support into its own work, her ceramics take up the earthen aspect of her acrylic and sand paintings. Making clay into spiraling forms that pull the energies around them up and down. The works contain visual properties of nature, such as twisted driftwood, shells, and the movement of weather systems, such as tornadoes and cloud formations. Using the rich color palette of sunsets, Fleishman infuses the surfaces with a saturated depth, in examples such as Form 1 and Form 9 (April 2024) (2024). Fleishman’s innovative approach to ceramics pushes the representation of nature, transforming the familiar into dynamic, abstract expressions of nature’s essence.

Landscapes are a long-held tradition and genre within painting–well respected and recognizable. However, Fleishman’s work challenges those preconceived notions of what constitutes as landscape within her work. While the horizon line and the beautifully rendered cloud forms are in her compositions, when one is up close, the land disappears, and the work is about the colors and forms dialoguing. As evident in her ceramics, the abstraction of nature informs the blended colors and centripetal forms. This synthesis of natural elements and abstraction allows Fleishman to redefine the boundaries of traditional landscape, inviting viewers to experience nature through a fresh and contemporary lens.

Artist Bio: Saskia Fleishman (B. 1995, Baltimore, MD), graduated Rhode Island School of Design in 2017 with a B.F.A. in painting. She has been an artist in residence at The Jentel Foundation, Tongue River Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Wassaic Project, PADA Studios, ChaNorth and Trestle Studios, and a curator in residence at Otis College of Art and Design. Saskia has had recent solo exhibitions at Galleri Urbane (Dallas, TX), Red Arrow (Nashville, TN) and Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA). Saskia’s work has also been included in group shows at Dinner Gallery (New York, NY), Kates-Ferri Projects (New York, NY), Unit London (UK), Goucher College (Baltimore, MD) and The Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (VA), among others. Her work has been featured in Visual Art Source, The Denver Post, Make Magazine, ArtMaze, Root Quarterly, Friend of the Artists, and Galerie Magazine. Saskia is based in Philadelphia, PA.

Artist Statement: These paintings offer a metaphysical connection to the world by preserving the spirit of the landscape where I am from and other natural places, I have spent time in. I grew up in Maryland on the Chesapeake Bay where my father was a landscape architect, my grandmother a landscape photographer, and my grandfather a wetland scientist. In recent years it has become clear, the tidewater landscape I call home is slowly disappearing because of the bay's rising sea level eroding the land.

This work ties our ephemeral landscapes to my fascination with the complexities of our existence. The work often depicts sunsets, full moons, or sunrises; transitory times of day that highlight our fleeting nature, but are perpetual, and invite meditation. Beaches, wetlands, mountain ranges, high plains, deserts, and wooded areas where I have felt the comfort and vast mystery nature holds, are sources for inspiration.

The paintings begin with out-of-focus snapshots I have taken of these places, that are digitally printed on transparent chiffon and stretched on bars. The prints are then overlaid with opaque flat masked airbrushed gradients and thick acrylic paint mixed with sand that I have collected from landscapes. The sand and paint mixture articulates the clouds, water, land, and vegetation in each work. Finally, a layer of thin paint is directionally airbrushed over the textural areas, to create an illusion of light and shadow.

In each work, the printed photographs are visible within cut-out abstract geometric shapes and patterns that represent the sensitivity, wonder and liminality I have felt in these places. The transparent forms create metaphorical portals to see through the veil of our temporal world, into possibilities beyond our own. These paintings honor the transient nature of life while acknowledging the eternal relationship we have to the universe, in hopes of finding transcendence and harmony.  

Available Art Work from Exhibition 

Video of exhibition on YouTube