Tess Jaray | Artist

For more than 60 years, Jaray has developed a singular practice which explores pictorial and architectural space through abstract painting.  Born in Vienna in 1937, Jaray came to the United Kingdom in 1938 as part of the flight of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. She studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1950’s. She was invited to return to the Slade in 1968 as the school’s first female lecturer, where she then taught for over thirty years. Her bold, illusory paintings combine a highly distinctive palette with floating, hard-edged motifs which are inspired by her encounters with Italian Renaissance and Middle Eastern architecture. Her compositions hint at the built environment through the isolation and repetition of details and motifs. While her practice touches upon certain aspects of Op Art, Minimalism and Colour Field painting, it resists formal categorisation.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (2019); Serpentine Gallery, London (1988); Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (1984); Adelaide Festival Centre, Australia (1980); and Whitechapel Gallery, London (1973). In 1995 she was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in recognition of the following significant public commissions: 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 Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Tate, London, UK; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Mumok, Vienna, Austria; The British Museum, London, UK; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, MA, USA; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; amonst others.

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