Saskia Fleishman: Tides

Baker—Hall is delighted to present Tides, Saskia Fleishman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, on view May 30 through July 1, 2026, with a public reception on Saturday, May 30 from 5—9pm.

In Tides, Fleishman presents a new body of paintings that meditate on the fragility, permanence, and spiritual resonance of the natural world. Rooted in personal memory and environmental reflection, the works draw from landscapes intimately connected to the artist’s life, particularly the Chesapeake Bay region where she was raised. Influenced by a family history deeply tied to ecology and landscape—her father a landscape architect, her grandmother a landscape photographer, and her grandfather a wetland scientist—Fleishman approaches the environment not only as subject matter, but as an emotional and metaphysical archive. As rising sea levels continue to erode the tidewater landscapes of her childhood, the paintings become acts of preservation, honoring places that are slowly disappearing.

Working between photography, painting, and textile processes, Fleishman constructs layered compositions that oscillate between abstraction and representation. Each work begins with an out-of-focus photograph taken by the artist and digitally printed onto transparent chiffon stretched over bars. She then overlays the surface with masked airbrushed gradients and thick acrylic paint mixed with sand collected directly from the landscapes depicted. Through this material process, wetlands, marshes, shorelines, and expansive bodies of water emerge as luminous and atmospheric environments suspended between memory and imagination.

Recurring imagery of sunsets and sunrises anchor the exhibition in moments of transition and impermanence. Fleishman incorporates geometric openings and transparent forms throughout the paintings, creating portal-like spaces where fragments of the underlying photographic image remain visible. These interruptions suggest thresholds between the physical and the spiritual, inviting viewers into contemplative spaces shaped by wonder, loss, and transcendence.

Rather than depicting landscape as fixed terrain, Tides approaches nature as a living and shifting force—one that mirrors the fleeting yet cyclical nature of human existence. Through layered materiality and atmospheric light, Fleishman’s paintings hold tension between erosion and continuity, intimacy and vastness, ultimately offering meditations on our enduring relationship to the world around us.