Tess Jaray, whose disciplined abstractions translated architecture into planes of color and measured space, has died at 88.
The British artist, printmaker, and educator died on May 24. Born in Vienna in 1937, she fled to Britain with her parents in 1938 after Nazi Germany annexed Austria, a displacement that formed the backdrop to a career defined by structure, restraint, and spatial intelligence.
Jaray studied at St Martin’s School of Art from 1954 to 1957 and then at the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 1960. A traveling scholarship to Italy that same year sharpened her interest in architecture, which would become one of the central engines of her work. By 1962, she was making hard-edge paintings that suggested facades, thresholds, and built forms without ever slipping into literal depiction.
Her method was exacting. Jaray used masking tape, multiple preparatory drawings, and later computer-based planning to construct compositions with no visible brushwork. In the 2000s, she extended that logic into works such as the “Thorn” series, in which painted metal supports were cut with laser designs, pushing flatness into a more sculptural register.
Architecture also shaped her public art. In the 1980s, she began taking commissions that brought her visual language into civic space, including a floor at Victoria Station in London in 1985, a brick precinct for Wakefield Cathedral from 1989 to 1992, and the stone floor of St. Mary’s Church in Nottingham in 2014. On the strength of those projects, she was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1995.
Jaray’s influence was equally strong in the classroom. She ran the postgraduate course at Slade from 1968 to 1999, teaching artists including Martin Creed. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2010 and received an honorary professorship from Norwich University of the Arts in 2017.
Her work is held in major collections including the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the British Museum, Tate, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Belvedere Museum and mumok in Vienna; and the Western Australia Art Gallery in Perth.
Jaray married painter Marc Vaux in 1960; they divorced in 1982. She is survived by her daughters, Anna and Georgia, and by four grandchildren.
