Artist: The Estate of Tess Jaray

Tess Jaray (1937-2026) was born in Vienna and lived in the UK from 1938 until the end of her life. Over the past six decades she has been recognised as a major pioneering figure in abstract art and the first female lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art where she taught for more than thirty years. Jaray’s bold, illusory paintings combine a distinctive palette with hard-edged motifs which are inspired by her encounters with Italian Renaissance and Middle Eastern architecture. Her compositions hint at the built environment though the isolation and repetition of details and motifs.

During the 1960’s she began exhibiting at the world’s most prestigious institutions alongside acclaimed mid-century artists such as David Hockney and Bridget Riley at Moderna Museet, Stockholm (1965), Karl Appel and Jesús Rafael Soto at Musée du Louvre, Paris (1966), Frank Stella and Donald Judd at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (1966), and Francis Bacon and Ben Nicholson at Tate, London (1967).

Since then, her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major institutions including Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK (1984); Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (1984); Serpentine Gallery, London (1988); and, most recently, Secession, Vienna (2021). Her work was also included in the 2021 exhibition, Women in Abstraction, at Centre Pompidou, Paris.

In 1978 she was invited as one of five female artists, alongside Rita Donagh, Liliane Lijn, Kim Lim and Gillian Wise, to select the landmark Hayward Annual ’78 exhibition. It made history as the first major institutional show of its kind to directly address and critique the heavy gender imbalances in the British art world. In 1995 she was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in recognition of public commissions at Centenary Square, Birmingham, UK (1988–92); terrazzo floor in the forecourt of Victoria Station, London, UK (1986); and mural for the British Pavilion at Expo 67, Montreal, Canada (1967).

In 2010 Jaray was elected a Royal Academician and in 2013, a Senior RA. Her work is held in numerous public collections including Brooklyn Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, France; Tate, UK; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Mumok, Vienna, Austria; The British Museum, UK; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, USA; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK.

Ben Hunter and Offer Waterman have jointly represented Tess Jaray since 2024.

Tess Jaray 1937–2026 obituary:

The Guardian
The Telegraph
Artforum