SEPTEMBER 06 - SEPTEMBER 29, 2001
Recent Paintings
Parkside, After Rain
STP-048-OC
San Francisco art legend Raimond Staprans, 75, brings a dynamic new group of landscape and still life paintings to public view September 6–29 in his first solo exhibition at Hackett-Freedman Gallery.
Staprans, a Latvian by birth who has lived and painted in the Bay Area since the 1950s, is known internationally to curators and collectors for his vividly colored, abstract views of nature and natural forms. This exhibition features a dozen paintings made between 1998 and 2001 which expand Staprans' trademark simplification of form, unerring sense of color and lush paint to ever more subtly interpreted water views and still life compositions.
In its hot, vibrant color and vigor of line, Staprans' work bears obvious connections to the works of the Bay Area figurative artists of the 1950s and 60s, particularly, David Park, Richard Diebenkorn and Roland Petersen. Legendary S.F. Chronicle art critic, Alfred Frankenstein, once described Staprans' landscapes as "among the finest examples of nature-in-abstraction being produced hereabouts."
Staprans' work also shows the inspiration of Wayne Thiebaud's highly schematized compositions and candy-colored palette. But beyond this connection, Staprans looks back to the flattened space and stylized forms of Matisse and Cézanne. His paint is luminous and layered and his humor gentle.
Susan Landauer, chief curator at the San Jose Museum of Art describes Staprans' work in The Lighter Side of Bay Area Figuration, the book for a traveling exhibition she curated for the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City last year. ". . . Thiebaud's cartoony caricature is absent, yet playfulness is an important element of Staprans' work," writes Landauer. Staprans, says Landauer, uses "unlikely combinations" and "the visual non sequitur, which plays with the viewer's expectations [for example], by positioning the sort of concrete steps found in swimming pools at the edge of an ocean-like expanse . . ."
Los Angeles art critic Peter Frank notes, ". . . like Cézanne, Staprans establishes and exploits an abiding tension between the palpability of things and their purely two-dimensional form, between the atmosphere of places and the almost map-like disposition of their topographies."
Raimonds Staprans began drawing views of boats and water from his house in Riga, Latvia, as a child. Escaping first from Latvia, and later from Germany, Staprans emigrated to America with his family in 1947. At the University of Washington, he studied with Alexander Archipenko and George Le Brun, who had a profound influence on him. The artist had his first San Francisco exhibition at Maxwell Galleries in 1955, following master’s degree studies at UC Berkeley. Since then, he has actively exhibited throughout Europe and the United States.
In addition to painting, Staprans is a widely lauded playwright in his native Latvia, where his latest plays are regularly published and produced.
Staprans' work is held in the collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, The Oakland Museum of California, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum, and the State Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia, among others.