Tess Jaray RA
Title
Honorary Doctor
Person Type
Honorary
Graduate of Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Art, Tess Jaray RA’s decade-spanning career has established her as one of the great current British painters and print makers. She was born in Vienna, Austria and moved to England in 1938 as a Jewish refugee fleeing occupation.
In 1964 she started teaching at the Hornsey College of Art before becoming the first female art teacher at The Slade in 1968 where she taught for 3 decades until she became Reader Emeritus in 1999.
Her creative practice, which employs architectural forms and repetition, spans across mediums including painting, drawing, and printmaking. She has had many solo exhibitions hosted by esteemed institutions including the Serpentine Gallery, the Ashmolean Museum and most recently at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield. Her artwork is housed in an impressive amount of public collections such as the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Musuem and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Tess’s work, which interrogates our relationship to space and scale, lives beyond museum and gallery walls in the form of large scale, publicly commissioned projects. Examples of her significant public art commissions include the tiled terrazzo floor at Victoria Station and the Tapestry Building installation at Granary Square. In recognition of her work, she was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 1995.
She is also well-known for her writing and has published several books, including a collection of essays titled Painting: Mysteries and Confessions. In 2010, she was elected as a Royal Academicians by the Royal Academy of Arts and made a Senior Royal Academicians in 2013.
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