Background
Tess Jaray was born on December 31, 1937, in Vienna. Jaray's father Franz Ferdinand Jaray was a chemical engineer and industrial inventor. Her mother, Pauline Arndt, attended Art School in Vienna. Jaray's great aunt was the gallerist Lea Bondi Jaray who was responsible for bringing many of the German Expressionists to London. They moved to UK in 1938.
Education
Tess Jaray studied at St Martin’s School of Art during 1954 – 1957 and the Slade School of Art in 1957 – 1960.
Career
In the few years following art school Jaray was awarded two traveling scholarships. In 1960 she received the Abbey Minor Traveling Scholarship to Italy. Here Jaray experienced for the first time the impact of Italian Architecture, as well as the art she had gone there to see. The following year she received the French Government Scholarship, which allowed her to return to France to live and work for some months. While in Paris she worked in the etching studio of Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17.
The impact of Renaissance architectural spaces Jaray encountered on her travels in Italy were formative for the development of her distinctive technique. In these ceilings she saw how simple lines interacted to transform space, powerfully inducing emotional responses. Much of her career as a painter has been spent investigating the quality of effects geometry, pattern, repetition and colour have on space.
The patterns she creates evoke spatial ambiguities and shifting structures which work on the viewer's perceptions in subtle ways. According to the critic Terry Pitts, her work senses the way in which history of decoration and patterning is embedded with elemental human experiences and impulses. At this time of significant development, in 1964 Jaray began teaching. For four years she taught at Hornsey College of Art, before becoming the first female teacher at the Slade in 1968. In 1999 Jaray became Reader Emeritus in Fine Art at the Slade.
Between 1985 and 2000 Jaray devoted much of her time to working on public commissions, applying her understanding of architectural space and pattern to large-scale projects in public spaces. Her significant work of the eighties was a terrazzo pattern design for London Victoria train station. In the nineties she completed further large-scale public projects including Centenary Square, Birmingham; Wakefield Cathedral Precinct; Jubilee Square at Leeds General Infirmary; and the forecourt for the new British Embassy in Moscow.
Throughout her career Jaray has used writing as a way to reflect upon her work. However, from the mid-nineties Jaray started increasingly to write about other artists’ work. Several of those pieces have appeared as catalogue essays for exhibitions and on BBC Radio 3's "The Essay." In 2001 Jaray collaborated with the German writer W.G. Sebald to realise an exhibition and book.
Later that year twenty-three of the writer's micropoems were brought together with Jaray's paintings in "For Years Now." It was published by Short Books in London shortly before Sebald's death in December that year. A selection of Jaray's essays and reflections on art and life were collected in "Painting: Mysteries & Confessions" published in 2010 by Lenz Books. In 1995 Jaray was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute for British Architects for her contribution to urban design. In 2010 Jaray was elected Royal Academician. She currently lives and works in London.
Views
Examining the geometry of pattern, repetition and colour within her surroundings, Tess Jaray has explored painterly perspective for more than five decades. Jaray focuses on producing the illusion of space, using perspective to create a field of spatial paradox that equates to distance and closeness in the mind. In many of her works the area of pattern is contained by a strong, grounding background colour, thereby controlling the movement of the forms.
Membership
Tess Jaray was made an Honorary Fellow of Royal Institute for British Architects in 1995 and a Royal Academician in 2010.