Tess Jaray: “It’s not in any way deliberate that when I’m painting I set out to create space. It’s all part of a process.”

How Tess Jaray’s paintings create profound illusions of architectural depth and beauty

Tess Jaray reflects on her journey as an artist, her architectural inspirations, and the challenges she faced as a pioneering female lecturer at the Slade School of Art.

Tess Jaray is a force within the landscape of contemporary abstract art, with a career that spans over six decades of innovation and boundary-pushing. Born in Vienna in 1937 and arriving in the United Kingdom as a young child during the upheaval of WWII, Jaray’s work is a profound blend of personal history and creative exploration. Her early studies at the prestigious Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art laid the foundation for a practice that transcends categorization, skillfully interweaving elements of Op Art, Minimalism, and Colour Field painting. Her role as the first female lecturer at the Slade School marked a groundbreaking moment for women in art education and paved the way for generations of artists to follow. With public commissions that have redefined spaces across the UK—from Birmingham’s Centenary Square to London’s Victoria Station—Jaray’s contributions to art and architecture are enduring and transformative.

Jaray’s paintings create an atmosphere that feels at once solid and ethereal, a reflection of her unique approach to space and form. Utilizing vibrant colour palettes and geometric motifs inspired by Italian Renaissance and Middle Eastern architecture, her compositions explore how repetition and isolation of forms can evoke the essence of architectural space without directly depicting it. Her work invites viewers to step into a world where structural lines and bold hues suggest something deeper—an unspoken connection between art and the built environment. Held in renowned collections worldwide, including the Tate, the Centre Pompidou, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, Jaray’s art is celebrated for its sophistication, its complexity, and its ability to continually reshape our perceptions of abstract art.

Tess Jaray’s art transforms space into an experience, her visionary use of colour and form inspiring wonder and depth in abstraction.

How has your background as a Jewish refugee from Austria influenced your artistic perspective and the themes present in your work?

I rejected it. It was so ‘foreign’ and I wanted to be a nice English girl. My parents saw themselves as ‘becoming English’. They loved everything English. We came to England in 1938, the year after I was born, so I knew little about life in Austria except through my mother, who was a great storyteller. She loved talking about her family and her early years. German wasn’t spoken at home as a matter of principle. My parents’ English was already good and they were well-versed in the English culture of their time.

My father was a chemical engineer who was able to escape to England because he had an industrial connection in Worcestershire. I grew up in rural Worcestershire. We kept goats, chickens and pigs and my best friend was a farmers daughter. I took all that for granted and I still miss it but simultaneously I wanted to get away from it because I wanted to be an artist and thought that artists were of the city.

It is only as I’ve grown older that I’ve discovered my wider cultural heritage and explored the musical and visual culture of Europe in my work.

Can you describe your process of using geometric forms and colour to create the perception of space in your paintings?

It’s not in any way deliberate that when I’m painting I set out to create space. It’s all part of a process. It’s more that without space there never seemed to be anything there. I’m not sure if that applies to other artists’ work but at least to mine it does. In itself a straight edge is not a particularly interesting thing so you have to use it to create space and make it interesting.

In what ways do you think your work interacts with or challenges the conventions of minimalism and Op Art?

When pushing non-figurative work beyond new boundaries you are always in the process of some ways of reduction and there is only so far that can go. The visual language is a limited language and the visual non-figurative language is even more limited. I think if I had realised that as a young artist I might have avoided it but it did seem at the time to be the right thing to aim for…to say as much as possible with as little as possible.

You’ve mentioned the importance of architectural influences in your art; how do you translate the experience of architecture onto a canvas?

It’s more a question of creating spaces that have a certain expression and form than a direct expression. It’s a question of looking at how the space works. You’re trying to reach something that you sense is there, but you don’t quite know what it is. I think this happened organically; architecture has always been part of my vocabulary as an artist. It opened the world, as it meant that you looked at architecture as well as the space it was in and the space it was contributing. Architecture, to me, seems to be the essential nature of art – how things relate together. Much like in architecture where the architect must consider making something that relates to what is around it. In painting, one must consider how to paint something new in a context that’s full of work that’s 500 years old.

What role does teaching play in your artistic practice, and how has your experience as the first female art teacher at the Slade School of Art shaped your work?

It’s always good practice to be forced to identify with students or other artists, and I was lucky to teach at the Slade where the calibre of students has always been very high. Some of my closest friends were originally my students. You can develop very close friendships with younger artists particularly if you are facing similar difficulties in your work.

When I went to teach at the Slade in 1968 I was the first female teacher there. I actually got the job because I was talking to one of the teachers, William Townsend, at a party and he said “Oh you must come in and do a day of teaching.” I said “Yes, I’d love to” and then I woke up the next morning and I remembered that William Coldstream had said ‘as long as I am a professor here, no woman will set foot over the threshold and teach,”

So I rang William Townsend and said “I can’t possibly come in with Bill having said that” and he said “Oh, don’t take any notice of that.” And so I came in for a day of teaching and then a few more and a few more, and amazingly, I’ve heard the odd complaint that there are too many women teaching there now and I think that’s a terribly good sign. Although, things have improved greatly for women artists, overall it was an advantage if you were a man, particularly a white, Western man.

As you continue to innovate in your practice, what new geometric forms are you exploring, and what do you hope to express through them?

I’m not interested in new geometric forms – I don’t think that’s possible. It’s a question of looking at what the existing forms can do and perhaps haven’t yet been used for. The marks themselves tell me how to proceed.

Portrait photo by Jack Edwards

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