Jacob Kassay (born 1984 in Lewiston, New York) is a post-conceptual artist best known for his work in painting, filmmaking, and sculpture. Critics have noted the influence of minimalist music and composition on his work, which applies a structural approach to the biological mechanisms of sight and spatial recognition. Kassay currently lives in New York City and is represented by 303 Gallery.
Early life
Kassay was born to Stephen and Rebecca Kassay. Both of his parents were government employees with Niagara County, New York. His father worked for the United States Postal Service and the department of Weights and Measures, and his mother worked in the county's probation office.
He attended college at the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he received a BFA in photography. As a student, Kassay studied with faculty such as Sylvie Belanger and Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble, who exposed him to semiotic and image theory, structuralism and post-structuralism, as well as the region's art historical significance to these ideas and artistic movements.
As a student, Kassay and fellow students at UB, founded Kitchen Distribution, a music center and art space. The organization was originally motivated by a class assignment, but would go one to become an important local venue. Burning Star Core, Tony Conrad, Japanther, and Pengo were among those that played there. Kitchen Distribution would also host Kassay's first solo exhibition, presenting the original series of paintings for which he would later become known.
Kassay eventually moved to New York, and early public exposure would come from the group exhibitions Cinema Zero: Bendover/Hangover organized by Amy Granat at White Flag Projects, St Louis and Neo-Integrity organized by Keith Meyerson at Derek Eller Gallery, New York. Early champions of the work were artists such as Ann Craven, Maurizio Cattelan, and Olivier Mosset, as well as curator Bob Nickas.
Work
Kassay has described his work as the relationship between structured forms and the individuated body. According to him, he uses traditional media to amplify haptic phenomena, and expose the mechanics of how space is conditioned.
Kassay is known for his use of industrial processes and materials, which he often uses to create works resistant to widespread reproduction. His earliest series of paintings made use of electroplating to produce compositions that reflect and distort the environment in which they are displayed. Critic Alex Bacon has written that these paintings “actively pose the question—what does it mean to be represented?...This kind of aesthetic activity is suspended somewhere between the “real” world that is reflected, and the particular aesthetic world a painting inhabits as an...autonomous thing.” The curator Anthony Huberman described how their “surfaces perform a graceful bait-and-switch: while they’re clearly seductive, they also divert the eye and blur its focus.”
His use of alternative surface treatments also characterize his paintings as cultural objects, while his chosen materials tend to produce compositions that uncouple painting from any fixed viewpoint. Multi-spec, a type of wall treatment which contains pigments that deliberately never blend together, have been applied to canvases, or directly to gallery walls. The physical properties of the paint are integral to these paintings. Additionally, they reflect an archive of the labor involved in the studio: Kassay collects the canvas discarded from other paintings, and produces unique stretchers to match each remnant, now numbering in the hundreds.
Kassay often draws upon earlier movements such as institutional critique. One series involved library books, which were borrowed from a nearby library. These works contrast public and commercial contexts to foreground certain unspoken commercial standards that determine how people interact with an artwork. The byproducts of regulation also forms the basis of a series of freestanding aluminum sculptures. The airspace above a series of specific stairwells were reproduced in works the artist refers to as “gutted corridors”. They were produced using highly skilled techniques, and push the material to its representational limits.