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.