Born in 1984 in Lewiston, NY, Jacob Kassay lives and works in New York. The artist challenges the traditional parameters of artmaking in conceptually driven installations that respond to and occupy their environment in unexpected ways. The arrangement of an exhibition and how his pieces interact with the surrounding architecture – and ultimately their audience – is key to understanding the essence of his work. Kassay’s paintings interrelate and form multiple dialogues: with each other, with the space around them and with the viewer. The language of materials is important to Kassay, who pays great attention to form, surface and physicality. Although lacking marks that could be conceived as gestural, a close inspection of his seemingly blank or monotone paintings reveals traces of their making – small incidental marks, or burnt edges, for example. Jacob Kassay’s practice also encompasses film and sculpture. Critic Alex Bacon has written that his work “actively poses 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.”
Kassay’s work features in the following selected international collections: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy; Museo Di Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Rovereto, Italy; FRAC Poitou-Charentes, Angoulême, France.