Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA)

Latvian-American artist and playwright Raimonds Staprans was born in Riga, Latvia in 1926. During World War II, he was forced to live in a displaced persons camp. In 1947, he immigrated with his family to the United States. Staprans studied art at the University of Washington with Alexander Archipenko and Mark Tobey and pursued graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley with Hans Hofmann, Karl Kasten, and others. After receiving his Master of Fine Arts degree from UC Berkeley, Staprans began exhibiting his work in San Francisco at Maxwell Galleries. Staprans still lives in San Francisco with his wife, the scientist Ilona Staprans, and they have two daughters. Now Staprans exhibits through Hackett | Mill Gallery in San Francisco and Peter Mendenhall Gallery in Los Angeles.

Stylistically, Staprans strikes a balance between Abstract Expressionism and representational art. Having been compared to artists as disparate as Paul Cézanne and Richard Diebenkorn, Staprans brings a formalist yet flexible approach to rendering landscapes and still lifes in a flattened manner. He distorts mundane objects and estranges recognizable scenes by employing stark geometrical elements and deftly managing light, color, and perspective. As a result, the viewer must take in compositions slowly to realize what is being depicted. Many of Staprans' paintings have the ordered quality of an architectural drawing and yet they offer an emotional valence for those patient enough to perceive their affective dimension.

Perhaps it is no accident that Staprans' visual art is highly, albeit subtly, constructed. This thoughtful deliberateness relates quite likely to his being a celebrated playwright as well. Most of Staprans' plays have been centered on subjects related to truth and fiction, totalitarianism and democracy, within the context of Latvia's 20th century history and position as a former Soviet territory. In the 1970s and 1980s, Staprans had his politically themed plays performed to wide acclaim in both San Francisco and Riga. His work was pivotal in galvanizing the pro-democracy movement in Latvia and, in 2003, he was awarded that country's highest civilian honor, the Order of the Three Stars.

In 1997, Staprans was interviewed at length by Paul Karlstrom for the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, which led to an illustrated book entitled, Raimonds Staprans: Art of Tranquility and Turbulence. A career retrospective of Staprans' work opened in 2006 at the Pasadena Museum of California Art and traveled to the Latvian National Museum of Art later that year. Another retrospective began in 2017 at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento and traveled to the San Jose Museum of Art in 2018. Today examples of Staprans' work are held by various institutions, including the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Portland Art Museum in Oregon.