Frieze Masters: Tess Jaray: Offer Waterman | Ben Hunter (C03)

Offer Waterman and Ben Hunter are delighted to present a solo both of works by Tess Jaray, comprising paintings from the period 1975-1988, alongside related drawings and gouaches. These works were central to her historic solo exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London in 1988.

Jaray was born into a Jewish family in Vienna in 1937 who fled to Britain the following year. She achieved recognition in the early 1960’s for her assured and sophisticated paintings informed by her training at Slade and travel scholarships to Italy and Paris.

Jaray’s practice touches on aspects of Minimalism and Op art but resists categorisation. Her poetic images are born of personal experience, particularly her encounters with Islamic and Renaissance architecture. She describes her practice as “a process of continuous development; the unravelling of an invisible structure, with each painting holding implicitly in it the history of all the previous ones”. This is exemplified in our selection of paintings where motifs evolve from Jaray’s ‘ceiling vault’ pictures and anticipate her subsequent public commissions. The twisting form of 'Kima’ develops into the inverted stepped lines of ‘Cadence’. Each work explores the tension between ‘warm/cool; this way/that way; moving/still’ and investigates pictorial and architectural space through abstract painting.

Jaray’s work was the subject of a major retrospective at Secession, Vienna in 2021 and was included in the 2023 Gwangju Biennale. Her solo show at The Millennium Gallery, Sheffield Museum, UK is now open and will run concurrently with Frieze Masters.