Tess Jaray, RA (b. 1937, Vienna, Austria) is one of Britain's most distinguished and influential painters. Jaray works in the abstract tradition; for over 50 years she has used painting, drawing and printmaking to explore and expand her personal interactions with architectural space, mass, surface and light. While her work may present as nonrepresentational, it is invariably informed by lived experiences of the visual world - what Jaray terms '[the] geometry of human relationships’.

Jaray often takes her own interactions with architectural sites as a starting point, although specificity is invariably abstracted. Using block colours and geometric forms, her intellectual and emotional experiences are distilled, translated and transposed into evocative compositions. The resulting works represent studies into the potential of repetition and reduction aiming to communicate ideas far greater than themselves. Throughout this process, Jaray constantly asks: 'How to present complex space with the simplest possible means?' The subsequent canvases are examples of 'what's left when everything else is taken away.'