Karsten Schubert London is pleased to announce the exhibition Tess Jaray: Early Drawings 1960–1980, featuring a series of 20 studies on paper and graph paper by the celebrated British artist Tess Jaray.
“And every time I went past, the astonishing geometry of the rows changed as if magically with each step I took. [The orchard was] both moving and still. It was simultaneously a purposeful object, a growing piece of country economics, a lesson in mathematics, a piece of living geometry, a volatile mystery, and a drawing lesson.” – Tess Jaray
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1960s
Each decade covered here tells the story of the imagery Jaray was making at the time, and her reduction of form over the years. Starting with the following studies dating from the 1960s, we get an insight into the way Jaray’s mind operates. These preparatory works, intimate in scale, provide subtle clues to their internal logic and help us to understand her creative process of forming graphic shapes. -
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When perspective is not used in the traditional Renaissance way, to create distance and represent reality correctly, it can create a field of spatial paradox that equates to distance and closeness in the mind. Rather than creating the illusion of space, Jaray was playing with the idea of space, creating, in essence, a reference to an illusion.
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1970s
As her work moved deeper into the realm of metaphysics, her fascination with geometry becomes more overt. Geometry, she has noted, helps us visibly transform “the seemingly infinite formlessness of the universe” into a world that is comprised of “an endless interconnected array of forms.”
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1980s
Both individually and collectively these are works concerned with the world's thresholds; those liminal and intermediate spaces that form the boundaries and places of transition which shape our experience of the world. But unlike the paintings these drawings are not themselves thresholds. There is no vanishing point for the eye to fix upon, no pierced, three dimensional surface to pass through. There is no distant horizon, no suggestion of a space beyond. Our gaze is unable to make its accustomed journey towards the reassuring safety of another solid object. Instead, we are held within a shimmering particle cloud of tiny marks that has no depth; caught in the threshold itself, in the space before the journey's end.
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Tess Jaray: Thinking on Paper
Hardcover
Publisher: Revolver Publishing
ISBN: 978 3 95763 500 6
Dimensions: 23 x 28.5 cm | 9 1/8 x 11 1/4 in
Pages: 336 pp
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Tess Jaray
Tess Jaray was born in 1937 in Vienna, Austria, before coming to the United Kingdom in 1938 with her parents as part of the flight of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. The family settled in Worcestershire where Jaray grew up. She studied at Saint Martin's School of Art from 1954 to 1957 and at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London from 1957 to 1960. In 1964 Jaray started teaching at Hornsey College of Art, working there until 1968 when she took up a role as the first female art teacher at the Slade School of Art, where she taught for three decades until 1999 when she was made Reader Emeritus.
Over the course of her distinguished career, Tess Jaray has developed a practice that despite sharing affiliations with minimalism, architectural drawing, Op Art and other movements, resists any singular classification. She has created her own pared-down visual language that focuses on the possibilities of space and how to express this through the reduction and control of form. Today Jaray continues to innovate and expand her practice from her studio in north London. She recently began to employ new geometric forms in her works.