Tess Jaray, a British painter known for her understated abstract works featuring grids, cubes, and zigzags on pale backgrounds, died on Sunday at age 88, as announced on her official Instagram account. Born in Vienna in 1937, she fled the Nazi regime with her Jewish parents and later studied at Saint Martin's School of Art and Design and the Slade School of Fine Art, where she became the first female teacher in 1968. Her career included monumental commissions in the 1980s and '90s, a survey at Vienna's Secession in 2021, and an appearance at the Centre Pompidou that same year.
Jaray's influence extended beyond her own practice through her teaching at Slade and mentorship of artists like Rana Begum, who served as her assistant. Though she lacked the fame of some Minimalist contemporaries, her quiet abstractions—inspired by patterns in nature and Renaissance art—resonated across generations. Her death marks the loss of a figure who bridged personal history, geometric formalism, and a philosophical search for universal meaning in art.