The magnificence of Renaissance, Baroque and Islamic art, plus her own Viennese background, were all subsumed into the creative imagination of architectural artist Tess Jaray. Yet her instincts remained essentially minimalist. From the terrazzo floor at Victoria Station, to the fifth-floor roof terrace of London’s Art Council, her abstract geometric designs invite you to look up to the sky or down to the earth. But before starting a new project, she pondered the question: “How is it possible to cut out everything extraneous to what you want to say?”
Jaray, who has died aged 88, was the first woman to be awarded a teaching role at the Slade Slade School of Fine Art, but will be chiefly remembered for her architecture-inspired art in public spaces. Visitors here can see her work today at the Tate, the V&A and the British Museum, but her talents took her way beyond the UK to Australia, Germany and Russia, where she designed the British Embassy’s new forecourt in Moscow between 1999–2001.
Her minimalist work featuring grids and rectangles may seem at odds with the majesty of the Baroque and Renaissance periods, yet offers a surprising nod to those eras. One example, pointed out by The Sunday Times’ art critic Waldemar Januszczak in 2016, is the way her pale greys and eggshell blues are divided by a jagged line reflecting the baroque balustrade in Rome’s church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane by Francesco Borromini.
Jaray’s red and blue triangular, geometric design at Birmingham’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts, From Outside, is bordered by a red and blue line that stops intriguingly before the end, posing a question about her intention.
She would begin working with an HB pencil on graph paper, evoking metaphor and memory. She hated to be too descriptive and discarded the drawing if she thought it was. Was she too mathematical? She disliked that association, claiming to be innumerate, particularly where shopping and income tax were concerned.
The idea of a mathematical element in her abstract art conflicted with her desire for timelessness.
Yet the late critic Brian Sewell disputed the idea that her art was truly abstract. Writing of her one-woman show at the Serpentine Gallery in 1988, he claimed “they are not based on the observation of an organic or architectural structure, and they are concerned with three-dimensional forms that attempt a movement into the fourth dimension, taking time to explore”.
Jaray’s move from art to architecture is reflected both in her patterned precinct outside Wakefield Cathedral,1989–92, and her brick design outside Leeds General Infirmary, created to offer a calm, relaxed atmosphere. Her Victoria Station floor is a lozenge extending east and west, creating a painterly effect.
“Victoria receives the whole world,” she told The Times. “Through the soles of their feet they will feel a little more at ease.”
Tess Jaray was the elder of the two daughters of Jewish parents, Franz Ferdinand Jaray, a chemical engineer and inventor, and Pauli née Arndt, a former fashion student. Her sister was born in Britain but predeceased her.
The family had been an integral part of Austrian culture, earning a royal warrant from the Habsburg Court, whose legacy is now in the MAK gallery in Vienna. But Tess’s uncle Richard was murdered by the Nazis along with several other family members.
Following the Anschluss of March, 1938 her father found himself on a Nazi wanted list of prominent Jews and fled to a business contact in Kent, who sponsored Pauli and Tess. But he was interned on the Isle of Man, leaving his wife and daughter to find lodgings in London. Later he found work in the apple and cider industry of rural Worcestershire, bereft of its engineers away fighting the war, and the family settled there in 1942.
Tess was educated at the Alice Ottley School in Worcester, which, according to Sewell, “intended to suppress her European roots, to render her English”. He added: “It succeeded, more rather than less, though there is still about her a fine-boned mettlesome quality that has the uneasy quality of a Halévy heroine.”
She did not learn of her Jewish heritage and her early Austrian background until she reached her late teens. Her introduction to art came from her collector grandfather. But when her great aunt and fellow refugee, Lea Bondi Jaray, took over Mayfair’s St George’s Gallery, her English education was tempered by the discovery of Klimt, Schiele and Kokoschka as well as Lucian Freud and Alberto Giacometti. Back in Vienna, Lea had run the Würthle Gallery, promoting the Secessionists.
As a teenager Jaray attended St Martin’s School of Art, from 1954 to 1957, moving to the Slade at the age of 20, studying art history under the tutelage of EH Gombrich, the Renaissance art historian. In 1960, she won a travelling scholarship to Italy where she was drawn to the perspective experiments by such early Renaissance figures as Giotto, Cimabue and Piero della Francesca. She described the vast and airy architectural spaces in Renaissance buildings and squares as “like opening a door into paradise”. She was confounded by such extraordinary spaces and later admitted that it had taken many years “before I grasped that creating space is how we define ourselves, how we protect ourselves”.
Travelling to Morocco and the Middle East later she felt hypnotised by the elaborate nature of Islamic art and architecture. It would endlessly inspire her own visual language in the pared-down style she had developed, which played with perspective and trompe-l’oeil. She would describe her work as a “process of continuous development, the unravelling of an invisible structure, with each painting holding… the history of all the previous ones”.
Jaray taught at Hornsey School of Art in 1964 for the next four years, before moving to the Slade where, as its first female art teacher, she taught for 31 years, running its postgraduate course. Public commissions followed in the 1980s, giving her the opportunity to create her geometric patterned murals, pavements and building facades, including the forecourt of Victoria Station.
She married Marc Vaux in 1960, and the two became an integral part of the glamorous and well-connected group known as The Young British Artists. Their marriage was described by the critic John Russell as “the annexation of a very beautiful girl”. The couple exhibited together at the Grabowski Gallery in Sloane Square in 1963 and appeared in Lord Snowdon’s book Private View: The Lively World of British Art, 1965. But their marriage was dissolved in 1982.
In 1991, Jaray took the leading role in redesigning Centenary Square, Birmingham, incorporating decorative paving and metal railings and lamps, which was praised as a groundbreaking development. However, in 2013 some of the original design elements were removed and a new competition was launched the following year to redesign the entire square. She was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1995, and a Royal Academician in 2010.
In 2001, Jaray worked with the German writer WG Sebald, illustrating his novels The Rings of Saturn and Vertigo with a series of screenprints for an exhibition in the Purdy Hicks Gallery in South Kensington. She published an essay collection on her own art and life, Painting; Mysteries and Confessions, 2010, followed by The Blue Cupboard: Inspirations and Confessions, 2014, an evocation of her Worcestershire childhood, which she suggested “may be read in the light, or perhaps one should say in the shadow, of its political history”.
Her essay series, Thinking on Paper, 2021, coincided with her solo exhibition in the city of her birth, Return to Vienna: The Paintings of Tess Jaray at the Secession building. Her final solo exhibition was her retrospective at Sheffield’s Millennium Gallery in 2024.
Jaray worked diligently in her studio in the daylight hours, resisting turning on the light, which she felt negated colour. She broke the habit only for her occasional trips to Italy to revisit her deeply admired paintings and architecture of the Italian Renaissance. She died after a fall and is survived by her daughters, Anna, an editor at the Times Literary Supplement, and Georgia, a graphic designer.
Tess Jaray: born December 31, 1937. Died: May 24, 2026
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