• Tess Jaray, Small Paintings from the Studio

    Presented by Ben Hunter & Offer Waterman
    Information / Available Works
  • Tess Jaray, 2025. Photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards

  • Ben Hunter and Offer Waterman are pleased to present Tess Jaray: Small Paintings from the Studio. 

     

    Small Paintings From the Studio is a unique opportunity to see a collection of small-format paintings by Tess Jaray in her studio in North London. Two walls of the studio are hung with paintings in the way in which the artist viewed them herself as she worked on them. Reduced to beautifully simple points of abstraction, these small works play with scale, colour and pattern, exploring perspective and the experience of space. As art writer Richard Davey says, these paintings "expand in the looking. You get lost in the space. You get lost in the colour. Suddenly they draw you in. They may look very hard-edged and formal, but they are really about the experience of being in the world.”

  • Photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards

  • How do you decide on the size of each piece?

     

     Tess Jaray: That has nearly always been decided by the nature of what I am dealing with. In each case, the size is decided by the dimensions needed for the image - if one can still refer to ‘the image’. [As we all know, there is a great difference between something depicted as very large or very small. In everyday life, this is easily seen: a small loaf of bread or bottle of beer declares its smallness in relation to a large loaf or bottle immediately. Particularly if you are hungry or thirsty. What I mean by difference is really impact]. There is a lot of what one might call giganticism going on at the moment, perhaps because the world is now so full. Some artists feel their work has to be enormous to make an impact. And of course, a large work often does make more impact. But is bigger really more powerful, or affective? I don’t think so. It seems to me to be a real challenge for an artist today to make something small that has as strong a presence as something large. Something that can hold its place on a wall and even give meaning to the space around it. 


    Emily Watkins, An Interview with Tess Jaray, Plinth Magazine, 25 July 2016

  • Photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards
  • Photograph: Jack Elliot Edwards
  • For more than 60 years, Jaray has developed a singular practice which explores pictorial and architectural space through abstract painting....

    For more than 60 years, Jaray has developed a singular practice which explores pictorial and architectural space through abstract painting. Born in Vienna in 1937, Jaray came to the United Kingdom in 1938 as part of the flight of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. She studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1950’s. She was invited to return to the Slade in 1968 as the school’s first female lecturer, where she then taught for over thirty years. Her bold, illusory paintings combine a highly distinctive palette with floating, hard-edged motifs which are inspired by her encounters with Italian Renaissance and Middle Eastern architecture. Her compositions hint at the built environment through the isolation and repetition of details and motifs. While her practice touches upon certain aspects of Op Art, Minimalism and Colour Field painting, it resists formal categorisation.

     

    Tess Jaray lives and works in London, UK. Jaray’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at Sheffield City Art Gallery, UK; Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham, UK; Serpentine Gallery, London, UK; Adelaide Festival Centre, Australia and Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK. In 1995 she was made Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in recognition of public commissions at Centenary Square, Birmingham, UK (1988–92); terrazzo floor in the forecourt of Victoria Station, London, UK (1986); and mural for the British Pavilion at Expo 67, Montreal, Canada (1967). In 2010 Jaray was elected a Royal Academician and in 2013, a Senior RA. Her work is held in numerous public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Tate, London, UK; Belvedere Museum, Vienna, Austria; Mumok, Vienna, Austria; The British Museum, London, UK; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Massachusetts, USA; and Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; amongst others. 

     

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    19 September - 26 September 2025 (appointment only)

    To schedule an appointment, please email Georgia Vaux (studio@tessjaray.com)

     

    Continues online until 31 October 2025

     

     

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