Raimonds Staprans

We are pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by Raimonds Staprans at Hackett Mill. The show focuses on the exploration of paint and process through work gathered from the artist's studio and archives, and includes several paintings that have never been exhibited. 

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 vibrant color and flattened compositions. Staprans's attention to formalist values creates a tension between representation and abstraction that plays with viewers' expectations. The paintings in this show have the rigorous geometry, expressive line, and strong emphasis on composition and color that are hallmarks of Staprans's painting style.
 
Staprans immigrated with his family to America in 1947 after fleeing Latvia following the Soviet invasion. After studying at the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley, he emerged into an art scene that was sharply divided between Abstract Expressionism and the newly evolving Bay Area Figurative Movement. For the past sixty years, Staprans has worked somewhere between these two worlds, defying convenient labels.
 
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, to name a few. Staprans's work was the subject of a career retrospective at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2006, as well as the recent exhibition, Full Spectrum: Paintings by Raimonds Staprans that opened at the Crocker Art Museum and traveled to the San Jose Museum of Art in 2018. A new scholarly publication accompanied this exhibition.