Jacob Kassay

[1] Critics have noted the influence of minimalist music and composition on his work,[2] which applies a structural approach to the biological mechanisms of sight and spatial recognition.

[7] Early champions of the work were artists such as Ann Craven, Maurizio Cattelan, and Olivier Mosset,[8][9][10] as well as curator Bob Nickas.

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.

Exploiting an accident of industrial regulations, the relationship between the camera and its subject produces an uncanny image of a flying helicopter with stationary rotors.

In “On Demand”, an article about fellow Buffalonian Ad Reinhardt published by The Brooklyn Rail, Kassay draws attention to the late artist's canny understanding of mass media and its effect on painting.

“The conglomeration of print technologies through which these paintings have passed have in turn yielded an excess of black surface,” Kassay observes.

The stroboscopic, random distribution of the film ‘grain’ is equally an explication of a medium's properties (i.e., film as the duration of a surface) while to some degree crossing into the territory of painting with fluctuating accelerations and stops.”[27] Solo exhibition at Institute of Contemporary Arts, London[28] The Institute of Contemporary Art, London presented Kassay’s first solo museum exhibition in 2011.

Kassay said of the show: “I put work throughout the building in places where paintings rarely rest—such as in the video archive, or in the lobby—to emphasize their presentation as an almost momentary, contingent stage.

The paintings were made so that they could be moved easily around the space and remain variable to the activity of the environment.”[17] In a review of a later show, New York Times critic Roberta Smith called Untitled (disambiguation) “quietly beautiful”.

The show was based on how the “implicit habits shape the way we rationalize, navigate, and narrate our own movement through familiar spaces.”[33] It featured Jerk (2017), a series of sculptures that recreate the arrangement of goods inside common home cabinetry.