Tess Jaray, Painter of Architectural Abstractions, Dies at 88
4May 29, 2026
British painter, printmaker, and educatorTess Jaray, whose spare geometric abstractions investigated notions of pictorial and architectural space, died on May 24. She was eighty-eight. The first female professor at London’s Slade School of Art, Jaray taught there for over three decades, shaping the careers of generations of young artists, to whom she was a warm and generous mentor. Concurrently, she continued to develop her practice, which was informed by minimalism, Op art, and architectural drawing, and intensely concerned with pattern and connection. “It took many years before I grasped that creating space is how we define ourselves, how we protect ourselves,” she toldThe Guardian.
Tess Jaraywas born to a Jewish family with deep artistic roots in Vienna on December 31, 1937, and emigrated to Worcestershire, England, the following year with her family as they fled the Nazis. She attended the Saint Martins School of Art in London from 1954 to 1957 and then enrolled at the Slade, where she studied under William Coldstream and Ernst Gombrich, graduating in 1960 and marrying fellow abstractionist Marc Vaux.
Thanks to a scholarship, she closely studied Renaissance architecture in Italy (“[It] was like paradise,” she would say, years later), and apprenticed in the etching studio of Stanley William Hayter in France. Back in England in 1964, she accepted a teaching role at Hornsey College of Art, where she remained until 1968, when she was invited to teach at the Slade.
By this time Jaray had begun to earn notice for her hard-edge geometric abstractions, which critics lauded as simultaneously sober and expressive. Exemplary of these are Castle Blue, 1962; Early Piazza, 1964; and Rialto, 1966, each of which appears to recall an architectural structure or detail, conjuring at once a sense of awe and calmness. Translating to canvas the experience of apprehending firsthand the built environment would remain a central fascination for the artist throughout her six-decade career. Among her methods of achieving this were the use of masking tape, which she deployed to produce perfectly straight perimeters; and flat, careful brushstrokes, which yielded a surface largely free of texture. More recent works, such as Boromini’s Balustrade Red & Green, 2014, and the “Thorn” series of 2014–, featured metal overlaid with acrylic, into which she cut patterns with a laser. Shaped canvases, too, appeared, as did inkjet prints.
A major facet of Jaray’s practice was public commissions. Her first was a mural for the British Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, but she dove into public art in earnest in the mid-1980s, designing the terrazzo pattern for the floor of London’s Victoria train station in 1986 and the granite diagonals gracing the forecourt of the new British Embassy in Moscow in 2000. Writing in the Architects’ Journal, Sue Duncan described her 1999 design for Jubilee Square, the approach to Leeds General Infirmary, as “a sinuous but muscular landscape of sumptuously curved structures and polychromatic brickwork.” Recent commissions include the stone floor of St. Mary’s Church in Nottingham, England, designed in 2014; and the 2017 wall sculpture Aleppo at King’s Cross for London’s Tapestry Building.
Jaray was made an honorary fellow Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1995 and retired from the Slade in 1999. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2010 and received an honorary doctorate from the University of the Arts, London, last year. Her work is held in the collections of major institutions including those of the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, England; the British Museum, Tate, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, all in London; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Belvedere Museum and mumok, both in Vienna; and the Western Australia Art Gallery, Perth. Jaray and Vaux divorced in 1982: She is survived by the couple’s two daughters.