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A unique way of creating art work by using chemicals created wonders for an artist!

Through the Looking Glass: Behind Jacob Kassay's Meteoric Auction Rise

Courtesy Eleven Rivington

Jacob Kassay's installation at Eleven Rivington in 2009

Courtesy Eleven Rivington

Those familiar with Jacob Kassay's secondary market say that the shinier and more purely silver a work is, the more saleable it has proved

NEW YORK— A couple of Tuesdays ago, during the biannual round of major auctions in
New York, something remarkable took place at a day sale — the sales of
lower-priced work that go on at the three major auction houses during
the less glamorous daytime hours — while the art world's attention was
trained on Warhols selling for many millions of dollars at the evening
sales at Christie's, Sotheby's
and Phillips. An untitled painting made by a 26-year-old artist, a
piece that had been made, first shown and sold in 2009 at the Lower East
Side's Eleven Rivington gallery, was hammered down at Phillips de Pury & Co.
for $86,500, over ten times its low estimate of $8,000 and well beyond
the $12,000 that such a piece would make on the primary market.

The painting sported a shiny silver surface produced by a unique alchemical-seeming process the artist has created, where he primes
canvases, then soaks them in chemicals and silver paint, finally drying
the paint and burning it along the edges. Like many works that succeed
at auction when the art market is heating up — as it seems to be doing
now — the piece had a shimmery, reflective quality that seemed to
bespeak a certain kind of vanity: Its owner would be able to see a vague
reflection of him or herself in its surface.