{"id":1956510,"date":"2026-05-26T17:14:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-26T14:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1956510"},"modified":"2026-05-26T17:14:00","modified_gmt":"2026-05-26T14:14:00","slug":"tess-jaray-dead-influential-abstract-painter-dies-at-88","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1956510","title":{"rendered":"Tess Jaray Dead: Influential Abstract Painter Dies at 88"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n\tTess Jaray, a British painter whose understated abstractions explored patterns that recur throughout the world, died on Sunday, according to an obituary posted to the artist\u2019s official Instagram account. She was 88.<\/p>\n

\n\tJaray specialized in paintings of grids, cubes, and undulating zigzags, all of them set atop palely colored backgrounds. She began making them during the 1960s, at a time when Minimalism reigned supreme across the pond, in the US. But her works exerted a quieter presence, without much of the drama that accompanied that movement.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe described a desire to reach something embedded deep within the human condition using these abstractions. In 2019, she told Studio International<\/em> that she wanted \u201cto make sense of the obsessive searching for patterns and repetition in nature and in art that have been so important \u2026 They may be seen as a meeting point, a coming together of the head and the heart and the external and the internal.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile Jaray may lack the name recognition had by some of the most famous artists of her era, she was influential, with her work looked at by artists of many generations\u2014some of whom studied with her at London\u2019s Slade School of Fine Art, where she became the first female teacher in 1968. The celebrated artist Rana Begum, for example, once served as Jaray\u2019s assistant and would later call her a friend; Begum went on to hang a painting by Jaray in her home.<\/p>\n

\n\tJaray was born in 1937 in Vienna. Her Jewish parents fled the Austrian capital the year after she was born, fearing the rise of the Nazi regime, and re-established themselves in Worcestershire, England. Many of the rest of Jaray\u2019s family members were killed in the concentration camps.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe spent much of her childhood drawing landscapes, and she went on to attend art school, first at Saint Martin\u2019s School of Art and Design, then at Slade. In 1960, the same year that she graduated Slade, she visited Italy, which she described as being akin to \u201centering another world.\u201d Having observed centuries-old buildings by Filippo Brunelleschi and Renaissance-era paintings by Piero della Francesca, she emerged with a new will to make art.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cI drew a line across the canvas, a horizontal line in the middle, and then I drew two lines going in at a slight angle,\u201d she told the Art Newspaper<\/em>, of her return to her studio. \u201cAnd I thought: \u2018Oh, my God, I\u2019m making space.\u2019 Suddenly, I realised that\u2019s what I wanted; I wanted to make space, to make something that you could disappear into. That wouldn\u2019t have happened without Italy.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Tess Jaray, Garden of Anna<\/em>, 1966.<\/span>Courtesy the artist and Exile<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n\tJaray later befriended thinkers such as W. G. Sebald and George Steiner. Her art also grew larger, occupying monumental proportions for commissions done in the 1980s and \u201990s. Starting in the mid-\u201990s, she began devoting more energy to her writing, at one point even penning a book alongside Sebald.<\/p>\n

\n\tRecognition came slowly for Jaray, who did not have a survey in her hometown of Vienna until 2021, when Secession mounted one. That same year, her work appeared at Paris\u2019s Centre Pompidou, in a show of female abstractionists.<\/p>\n

\n\tShe continued to speak plainly of her work, leaving it mostly to her viewers\u2019 interpretation. In 2013, when the White Review<\/em> asked her to describe her art, she responded, \u201cI would say that my work is what\u2019s left when everything else is taken away.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/TessJaray_Ref-0815.jpg?w=1024″] Tess Jaray, a British painter whose understated abstractions explored patterns that recur throughout the world, died on Sunday, according to an obituary posted to the artist\u2019s official Instagram account. She was 88. Jaray specialized in paintings of grids, cubes, and undulating zigzags, all of them set atop palely colored backgrounds. She began […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1956510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1956510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1956510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1956510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1956510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1956510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}