Location: 2277 Monitor Street, Dallas, Texas, 75207
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Contours, an upcoming solo exhibition by Philidelphia artist
Saskia Fleishman. This marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery following her recent
successful inclusions at NADA New York, The Armory Show, and the Survey Exhibition of Gallery Artists.
An essay by Eve-Hill Agnus accompanies this exhibition:
It is the slippages that are riveting in Saskia Fleishman’s work, edges opening onto something vast.
The paintings originate as photographs: a sunset off the Maine coast, a stretch of New Jersey shoreline
at sunrise, the rust-toned rock outside Sedona. Printed onto chiffon, each piece then becomes a
negotiation between what is held and layered, and what simply passes through.
Where Fleishman applies it, locally sourced sand gives acrylic something to grip, creating almost
topographic strata. Elsewhere, the chiffon remains bare, the image sheer, gossamer, kinetic, changing
color with every movement and shift in light. Two conditions coexist in the same object. The contrasts—
gauzy and sheer against grainy, thick brushstroke against delicate fabric—are where contradictions in
texture dwell. It is a dual materiality, each half explaining the other. And like doorways that drift in the
gallery, they function as portals.
The technique itself has shifted since Fleishman last showed a body of work at Galleri Urbane.
Previously, mismatch was structural to the process: the artist masked off sections of the printed chiffon
and painted from a photographic reference no longer visible beneath the mask, ceding the final
alignment to chance. A horizon that drifts half an inch. A color that lands a shade off. The current body
of work introduces a documenting step mid-process that allows Fleishman to hold the seam far closer
to exact.
The cut-out sections still recede, the painted portions still advance, the optical effect remains intact, but
the transition between them is now clearly continuous rather than a visible glitch. The seam so close to
seamless that it seems closer to a feeling.
That sensation is the true subject of the work. Fleishman speaks of the seam in terms more spiritual
than technical. “I’m thinking about a moment in the veil of the world,” she has said, “that you’re having
access to something else, something beyond. And what that space looks like.” Perhaps like a glitch in
the matrix. An unnoticed place. A rend in the veil, where one might be allowed to see whatever sits
beyond the visible surface. In these moments at the edges of the cut-out ribbons, “a little something
flickers.”
Her compositions seem designed to hold that space open. The horizon sits low in the frame. Anything
afloat in the water gathers toward center; the cut-out forms—shapes Fleishman sketches loosely in a
notebook before placing them, intuitively—carry an almost physical equilibrium of weight answering
weight elsewhere in the canvas. There is something powerfully peaceful and meditative about them.
Change is not a threat to brace against in these works; their serenity is a refusal to read change as loss.
The ceramics in the show inhabit a related territory. Hand-built and bisque-fired, left with a matte
surface that recalls the raw material, they are airbrushed using the same technique Fleishman applies
to the chiffon. She has been circling spirals recently, drawn to their recurrence throughout the natural
world as a kind of infinite reference.
Fleishman’s earlier exhibitions favored titles pitched toward atmosphere. Contour is a word about
edges: the line where one form yields to another. It is, she notes, a term from drawing before it is
a term from landscape. Look closer and the word extends further still: a contour is also where one
dimension gives onto another, and the edge of a reality might be traced. The masking is not an
incidental technique—it toes a line between the transparent and the opaque, negotiated until it is
almost, but not quite, invisible.
That is where Fleishman places us. And it is the position she asks us to hold: neither fully inside the
landscape nor outside of it, but caught, briefly, in the seam.
