Raimonds Staprans

Raimonds Staprans (b. 1926 –) is a painter whose still life and landscape compositions explore color and form by examining the geometry or ‘architecture’ of everyday objects—chairs, tables, fruit, anonymous buildings—and subverting their inherent naturalism via explosive color and flattened compositions. Staprans’ attention to formalist values creates a tension between representation and abstraction that plays with viewers' expectations.

Raimonds Staprans immigrated with his family to America in 1947 after fleeing the Soviet invasion of Latvia. He studied art at the University of Washington under Alexander Archipenko and Mark Tobey, he obtained his master’s degree at UC Berkeley where he studied with Hans Hofmann. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the San Jose Museum of Art, among others. In 2005, the University of Washington Press published Raimonds Staprans: Art of Tranquility and Turbulence, a full-color monograph by Paul J. Kalstrom with essays by Peter Selz and Helena Demakova. Staprans was the subject of a career retrospective that opened at the Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art in March 2006 and traveled to the State Museum in Riga, Latvia.(Hackett-Freedman)



++Hackett-Freedman
++ Interview with Raimonds Staprans here at Hackett Freedman