Tess Jaray

Born 1937 | Vienna
Lives and works London

A year after she was born, Tess Jaray and her parents moved from Austria to the United Kingdom, as part of the flight of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. The family settled in Worcestershire where Jaray grew up. She studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design from 1954–7 and at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London from 1957–60. Thereafter, Jaray taught at Hornsey College of Art before becoming the first female art teacher at the Slade, where she taught from 1968–99. Over the course of her career, Jaray has developed a practice that, despite sharing affiliations with minimalism, architectural drawing, and Op Art, resists any singular classification. For more than six decades she has explored the possibilities of creating space within abstract painting, experimenting with form, repetition, and colour to create compositions that evoke architectural environments and are simultaneously close and distant, sober, and expressive.

Tess Jaray, Installation view, 14th Gwangju Biennale (2023). Image courtesy Gwangju Biennale Foundation. Photo: glimworkers