Saskia Fleishman — Contours
October 3 - November 14, 2026
Galleri Urbane is pleased to announce Contours, an upcoming solo exhibition by Philadelphia-based artist Saskia Fleishman. This marks the artist’s second solo show with the gallery following her recent 2026 NADA New York inclusion.
“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.”
Margate NJ (September 14 2025 7:12PM), 2026
Acrylic and locally sourced sand on digitally printed chiffon
62.9h x 94.4w inches
An essay by writer Eve Hill-Agnus accompanies the exhibition.
You must get close to Joseph Carway’s work to enter his world, which is ever so gently bewildering. The dimensions—often plywood the size of an A4 sheet of paper—lend themselves to such intimacy. A vestige from his earliest days of sketching out ideas as tattoo flash art, the size is also pragmatic formally. Within the bounds of its surface, Carway creates intimacy: like watching a tiny television set with your face one inch from the screen, or a condensed, private theater staged for an audience of one.
You may call it folk art, or art brut, or naive art if you would like to trace kinship. Carway does indeed cherish found objects and collect old folk pieces, finding them refreshingly simple and unaffected. He admires the rudimentary toy a parent makes for a child, its unskilled roughness paired with intuition. He admires that a tattoo can be read as folksy and avant garde in its own secret way—the way ink softens and spreads into ambiguous blurs fascinates him as much as the tattoo’s power to convey ideas from a small box of symbolic tricks. He admires, too, the work of the French Nabi painter Edouard Vuillard: the flatness of pattern, the condensing of textures in a small space, just as Carway’s own work compresses a scene until there is no longer a difference between the figure and the field it stands in.
What the artist harbors in a limited space is, paradoxically, both intimacy and a reaching beyond. The fourth dimension is built into the process. Carway distresses his surfaces by hand, adding texture, until they look older than they are. Call it time- travel taken on faith, a manner of meeting the painting as though it had already lived. Underneath the work’s playfulness lies a wistfulness—a desire for a thing to already have a history, to be exempt from the risk of being new.
Across Carway’s body of work, figures tend to arrive in pairs. Two small companions, leaning toward or away from each other. Whether the encounter reads as embrace or conflict, it is a shape a viewer recognizes before naming it. They might be two illustrations that wandered loose from the same storybook and simply found each other on the page. Humor infuses these pairings, but never at the expense of what might lie underneath. “Life all means so much and it all means so little,” Carway has said. His pieces hold both—to be taken exactly as seriously as they deserve: completely and not at all. They spin a moral tale if we choose to read it that way.
Todd, NC (March 19 2025 7:38AM), 2026
Acrylic and locally sourced sand on digitally printed chiffon
59h x 43.3w inches
Sedona (August 23 2025 5:59AM), 2026
Acrylic and locally sourced sand on digitally printed chiffon
48h x 48w inches
Sedona (August 23 2025 5:59AM), 2026
Acrylic and locally sourced sand on digitally printed chiffon
48 x 48 inches
To render the profound and simple requires clarity and confusion at once. Carway straddles both. Bewilderment runs through Carway's account of his own process, and he holds it without apology. His work offers the sensation of standing at the edge of meaning and finding this edge to be a funny, absurd but ultimately livable place. This is the position of a child with a pen and a sheet of paper, who does not wait for the confusion to resolve before drawing the next line. Neither should we.
Curtain 2, 2026
Digitally printed chiffon and wood
30h x 36w inches
Todd, NC (March 19 2025 7:38AM), 2026
Acrylic and locally sourced sand on digitally printed chiffon
59h x 43.3w inches
Sedona (August 23 2025 5:59AM), 2026
Acrylic and locally sourced sand on digitally printed chiffon
48h x 48w inches
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 depict sunsets or sunrises; transitory times of day that highlight our fleeting nature, but are perpetual, and invite meditation. Beaches, wetlands, mountain ranges, 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 abstractions 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.
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 Kates-Ferri Projects (New York, NY), Galleri Urbane (Dallas, TX), Red Arrow (Nashville, TN) and Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA). Saskia’s work has also been included in group shows at Baker—Hall (Miami, FL), David B. Smith Gallery (Denver, CO), Dinner Gallery (New York, NY), Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery (Berlin, DE), Goucher College (Baltimore, MD), Peep Projects (Philadelphia, PA), 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.