Tess Jaray Dead: Influential Abstract Painter Dies At 88

Tess Jaray, the British painter whose grids, cubes, and wavering zigzags gave abstraction a hushed, architectural pulse, has died at 88. An obituary posted to her official Instagram account said she died on Sunday.

Jaray was born in Vienna in 1937. After her birth, her Jewish parents fled to Worcestershire, England, as the Nazi regime rose in Austria. Many members of her extended family were later killed in concentration camps, a history that shadowed her life even as her work moved toward order, repetition, and spatial calm.

She studied first at Saint Martin's School of Art and Design and then at the Slade School of Fine Art in London. In 1968, she became the first female teacher at the Slade, where she influenced generations of artists, including some who later studied with her directly. Rana Begum, who once worked as Jaray's assistant, later described her as a friend and kept one of her paintings in her home.

Jaray's paintings, often built from pale grounds and spare geometric forms, began in the 1960s, when Minimalism was ascendant in the United States. Her work shared that movement's interest in structure, but it carried less theatrical force. Instead, it suggested stillness, distance, and the possibility of entering a space rather than merely looking at it.

Italy proved decisive. After visiting in 1960, the year she graduated from the Slade, Jaray said she felt as if she had entered“another world.” Seeing the buildings of Filippo Brunelleschi and the paintings of Piero della Francesca changed her sense of what painting could do. She later recalled drawing a line across the canvas and realizing, almost at once, that she was“making space.”

Recognition came slowly. Her first survey in Vienna did not arrive until 2021, when Secession mounted one, and that same year her work appeared at the Centre Pompidou in a show of female abstractionists. By then, Jaray had also expanded into writing, befriending figures such as W. G. Sebald and George Steiner and, at one point, working on a book with Sebald.

Jaray often resisted over-explaining her art. In 2013, she said,“I would say that my work is what's left when everything else is taken away.” It is a fitting description for an artist who made restraint feel expansive.

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