Tess Jaray

Offer Waterman and Ben Hunter are delighted to announce co-representation of Tess Jaray.

For more than 60 years, Jaray has developed a singular practice which explores pictorial and architectural space through abstract painting. Jaray has described her practice as “a process of continuous development; the unravelling of an invisible structure, with each painting holding implicitly in it the history of all the previous ones”.

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.

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Tess Jaray is represented in Austria by Exile Gallery, Vienna.

Press Release JUly 2024

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Selected solo exhibitions: Sheffield Museum, UK (2024); Exile Gallery, Vienna (2023 & 2018); Vienna Secession, Vienna, Austria (2021); New Art Centre, Salisbury, UK (2021); Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, UK (2019); Sotheby’s S|2, London, UK (2017); Serpentine Gallery, London, UK (1988); Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, UK (1984); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (1984); Adelaide Festival Centre, Australia (1980); Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (1973); City Art Gallery, Bristol (1972).

Jaray's work has been included in over 90 group exhibitions including: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France (2021); Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK (1993/1988); Camden Arts Centre, London, UK (1981); Hayward Gallery, London, UK (1978/selector and artist 1974); Kunsthalle, Bern, Germany (1973); Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden (1965).

Her work is held in public collections in the UK, Europe, USA and Australia, including: Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Tate, London, UK; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Mumok, Vienna, Austria; British Museum, London, UK; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, MA, USA; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Western Australia Art Gallery, Perth, Australia; Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK.

Since the mid-1980s Jaray has completed a succession of major art commissions in public places, including: Aleppo for the Tapestry Building at King’s Cross, London, UK (2017); Centenary Square, Birmingham, UK (1988–92); a terrazzo floor in the forecourt of Victoria Station, London, UK (1986); and a mural for the British Pavilion at Expo 67, Montreal, Canada (1967). In 1995 she was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in recognition of these important public commissions.

Jaray was elected a Royal Academician in 2010 and was made a Senior RA in 2013. She lives in London and is continuing to make new work. In 2023, a group of her paintings from the 1980’s were shown in the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. A new retrospective of her work opened at the Millenium Gallery, Sheffield Museum on 20 July 2024.

Further Reading:

Tess Jaray, Thinking on Paper: Drawings on paper from 1960-2000, Secession, Vienna, 2021

Vivien Lovell, Charles Darwent, Doro Globus, Desire Lines: The Public Art of Tess Jaray, Ridinghouse, London, 2016

Richard Davey, John Stezaker, Alison Wilding and Alister Warman, The Art of Tess Jaray, Ridinghouse in association with the Djanogly Art Gallery, London, 2014

Tess Jaray, The Blue Cupboard: Inspiration and Recollections, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2014