303 Gallery is pleased to announce Jacob Kassay's presentation of new work at R.M. Schindler's Fitzpatrick-Leland House at the peak of Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles. Commissioned in 1936 as a model home by developer Clifton Fitzpatrick, the Fitzpatrick-Leland house underwent numerous modifications by previous owners until being acquired by Russ Leland in 1990, who restored much of its original design.
In a site layered with a history of iterations and mixed uses, Kassay presents a group of raw stretchers from his ongoing series of irregularly shaped remnant paintings, which emerge from the residual textiles leftover from the production of other paintings and from the studios of fellow artists. While Schindler’s house was originally built solely for display, these works take shape from excess material typically omitted from use and view. These discards are recouped as blueprints for paintings, where each remnant is given a wooden support that follows its discrete profile and contours, reversing the conventional procedure of producing paintings where surface is trimmed to fit its substrate.
Parallel to the standardized format of rectilinear painting supports, the remnant stretchers have acted as templates, faced with multiple surfaces and cycled through a series of exhibition spaces. Beginning with The Kitchen’s black box theater and continuing with 303 Gallery’s white walls, these works have shifted their surfaces following their successive transferals into different locations, first from the original textiles to painted surfaces and now separated from them entirely. While the Fitzpatrick-Leland House includes few elements of domestic utility, the remnant works are installed in this template home at their most unadorned yet primary state, highlighting both the surrounding interior’s interlocking volumes as well as their own internal boning. In as much as the renovation of the Fitzpatrick-Leland House erased its alterations in its restoration back towards an earlier state, the stretchers presented within it shed their prior surfaces as they continue to assume new modes within the same outlines.
Accompanying the exhibition is the release of Kassay’s new book with Mousse Publishing, an index of the entire series of stretchers of which these exhibited works are sampled.
Jacob Kassay was born in Lewiston, NY. He received his BFA from State University of New York at Buffalo and now lives and works Los Angeles. Recent solo exhibitions include The Kitchen, New York; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; The Powerstation, Dallas (catalogue) and Institute of Contemporary Art, London (catalogue).