Raimonds Staprans (born 1926) California Listed Artist Oil "Moored Boats"

Raimonds Staprans (born 1926)

Raimonds Staprans is active/lives in California. Raimonds Staprans is known for abstract imagery-still life painting, sculpture.

Signed lower right
Oil on canvas
Painting Size: 24" x 36".
Frame Size: 30 1/2" x 42 1/2".
Dated 1944
Gallery label on verso

CONDITION
Good condition, a few tiny nicks are spotted but the painting has aged very well.

Biography

Bay Area artist Raimonds Staprans was born in 1926 in Riga, Latvia. Fleeing a Soviet invasion in 1947, Staprans immigrated to America. Along with his family, he settled in Washington, where he enrolled at the University of Washington, Seattle. In 1954, he went on to earn his MA at the University of California, Berkeley. There he studied under the Abstract Expressionist painter Hans Hofmann.

Staprans is an abstract painter whose compositions are minimalist in both concept and execution. Though grouped with the Bay Area Figurative painters, Staprans' style is more akin to the geometric abstractions of de Staël and Piet Mondrian. Nonetheless, the tension between representation and abstraction is the key to understanding Staprans' work. This tension arises from Staprans' need to impose order on a chaotic world, while acknowledging the disorder of personal experience. His oeuvre is comprised predominantly of landscapes and still lives. The figure almost never appears in his paintings; rather, narrative and temporal reality are left to the page.

In addition to being a painter, Staprans is an active teacher whose colleagues include Richard Diebenkorn and Wayne Thiebaud. An accomplished playwright, his most famous play, The Freezing, earned him Latvia's highest civilian honor in 2003: the Three Star Medal. Set in 20th century Latvia, The Freezing explores the nature of human relationships under Latvia's totalitarian regime. Correspondingly, his nudes reflect the existential despair that permeates his written work. They are - in essence - a form of self-representation that synthesize the defining characteristics of Staprans' oeuvre: Latvian nationalism, figuratively-based abstraction, and psychological expression.

His work can be found in the collections of many prominent institutions, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Phoenix Art Museum, AZ; Portland Art Museum, OR; Los Angeles County Art Museum, CA; Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, CA; and the State Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia. In 2006, the Pasadena Museum of California Art held a traveling retrospective.

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PROVENANCE
Private Collection from New York