Tess Jaray, the British artist, printmaker and educator whose hard-edge abstractions were informed by a lifelong fascination with architecture, has died at the age of 88, per artnews.com.
Her death on May 24 was confirmed by the Guardian.
Born in Vienna in 1937 into a Jewish family, Jaray fled to Britain with her parents following the Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938. Her father was an engineer and inventor, while her mother had studied fashion. Her father’s aunt was collector and gallerist Lea Bondi Jaray, and his godfather was the eminent art historian Ernst Gombrich.
She studied at St Martin’s School of Art from 1954 to 1957 before graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 1960. A travelling scholarship to Italy that year sparked her enduring interest in architecture, which would become a central influence on her paintings and public art projects.
By 1962, she was producing hard-edge abstract works that evoked architectural forms, created with masking tape to eliminate visible brushstrokes. Later works, including her “Thorn” series from 2014, featured painted metal supports with laser-cut designs.
In the 1980s, she began accepting public commissions, including a floor at Victoria Station in London (1985), a brick precinct for Wakefield Cathedral (1989–1992) and the stone floor of St. Mary’s Church in Nottingham (2014). She was made an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1995.
She ran the postgraduate course at the Slade from 1968 to 1999, where her pupils included Turner Prize-winning artist Martin Creed. She was elected a Royal Academician in 2010 and awarded an honorary professorship by Norwich University of the Arts in 2017.
Her work is held in major institutional collections, including the British Museum, Tate and Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Belvedere Museum in Vienna. She married painter Marc Vaux in 1960; they divorced in 1982. She is survived by their two daughters and four grandchildren.
•Featured image: Tess Jaray at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, December 1957/John Pratt/Keystone Features/Hulton Archive/Getty Images