Tess Jaray: Viewing Room

23 April - 7 May 2020 Online
Overview

 ‘...these paintings have no glance life, large though they are, the brisk visitor simply will not see them. Their designs grow from Jaray’s belief in the disciplines of contemplation, and their colour from her intuitive judgement of response and relationship.’

Karsten Schubert London presents Tess Jaray: Paintings from the 1980s, the first exhibition in a series of online programming. One of Europe’s most celebrated abstract painters, Tess Jaray (b. 1937) has explored painterly perspective for more than five decades.

 

In the four paintings selected here – Cadence (1986), Thirty One Steps (1986), Diversion (1987) and Green Pyramid (1987) –Jaray investigates the visual experience of space through focusing on individual architectural elements, such as vaults, ceilings and staircases. Painted stripes, in subtly shifting colour variants, encounter negative space on a single grounding colour in these, expressing both the two dimensional and the three dimensional.

 

Brian Sewell encapsulates the impact of these paintings in his 1988 review of the exhibition Tess Jaray: Paintings and Drawings of the 1980s at the Serpentine Gallery, London, writing ‘these paintings have no glance life, large though they are, the brisk visitor simply will not see them. Their designs grow from Jaray’s belief in the disciplines of contemplation, and their colour from her intuitive judgement of response and relationship.’

 

Karsten Schubert London is delighted to present this online exhibition following recent acquisitions of Tess Jaray’s paintings by the Centre Pompidou, Paris and mumok, Vienna.

Installation Views
Works