Latvian National Museum of Art

Raimonds Staprāns. The Architecture of Silence

From 15 August 2026 to 17 January 2027, the exhibition “Raimonds Staprāns. The Architecture of Silence” will be on view in the 4th-floor halls of the Latvian National Museum of Art (Jaņa Rozentāla laukums 1, Riga). The exhibition is organized in commemoration of the centenary of the distinguished Latvian exile artist — playwright and painter Raimonds Staprāns (1926–2026).

The emergence of exile art was caused by the outcome of World War II, which triggered a wave of migration. In the Baltics — Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — hundreds of thousands of citizens, fleeing the front and the approaching hostilities and the expected renewed occupation by the Red Army, decided to head west as refugees. People fled Bolshevik terror and deportations, such as those experienced in 1941.

Among the refugees was Raimonds Staprāns’ family, who had already experienced Ulmanis’ coup, the first Soviet occupation, then the German occupation, and had felt the uncertainty of all those political upheavals. His father — a surgeon, social democrat, and Riga councilor — and his mother — a master of German philology, a literature teacher with a love of poetry and art — undoubtedly influenced the formation of the future artist’s personality. During their time as refugees in Germany, Raimonds Staprāns completed school in Ebenweiler and then studied at the Latvian art school in Esslingen. In 1947, the family emigrated to the United States and settled in Salem, Oregon. Staprāns studied painting and drama at the University of Washington in Seattle (1948–1952) and earned his MFA at the University of California, Berkeley (1952–1954), the formative epicenter of abstract expressionism on the West Coast. The intellectual environment of the U.S. West Coast significantly influenced his artistic development. Staprāns did not separate abstract painting from figurative painting; he was drawn to simple, uncluttered and balanced composition, taut arrangements of sunlit and shaded planes, and nuanced tonal relationships. Although Staprāns adopted figurative means for depicting objects and landscapes, the governing idea in his art was always the autonomy of art: his works are not about narrative or illustration but about color and composition. Staprāns’ painting is rooted in the notion of art for art’s sake. Like the 19th-century proponents of l’art pour l’art, he embraced the idea that art should not be subordinated to morality, politics or didactics, but should exist for its own sake — as pure aesthetic value. Raimonds Staprāns said: “I have no general social ideology, I do not want to improve the world, ideas are one hundred percent painterly. Only the painting itself matters.” Paul J. Karlstrom, researcher of Staprāns’ art, has labeled the artist’s style “abstract realism.” His work can be associated with the figurative school of Bay Area Painting.

Sixteen paintings by Raimonds Staprāns have been selected for the exhibition at the Latvian National Museum of Art. These works have never been exhibited in Latvia, and they travel to Riga from the artist’s studio in San Francisco where he painted every day of his life. The exhibition invites visitors to explore the evolution of the artist’s oeuvre, tracing its development from early 1950s compositions to the final works of his lifetime.

At the beginning of his career Staprāns painted coastal landscape compositions, both abstract and figurative, with thick textures and ratios of ochre, black, dark red and gray geometrized planes. In the 1960s his works were stripped of narrative — there are no objects, only one to four color tones; they are almost abstract, yet their structure is based on a landscape outlook: the horizon line is preserved and the arrangement of planes suggests an object-based environment. In the 1970s expressive, painted dramatic figures appeared in Staprāns’ art — angry birds, female nudes, and head compositions. By the mid-1980s his painting practice changed significantly and introduced pop-like still lifes. He painted paint cans, solvent bottles, brushes dipped in a glass, tables, chairs, orange crates, fruits — simple household objects. Contours of objects became precise, the placement of planes carefully constructed, colors intense, and canvas surfaces smoothly treated. The California coastal landscape — sunlit boat piers, the flat surface of the ocean, neatly mowed lawns, tennis courts, solitary buildings — became the geometry of Staprāns’ paintings. The architecture of these paintings is built on the principles of abstract expressionism, where planes of color are the main means of expression. The expansion of color in the paintings is internally taut and leads to deep expressiveness. Raimonds Staprāns’ art is an intellectual language of painting. His paintings embody color clarity, light, strict architectural structure, and silence. His silence is a silence that speaks.

Within Latvian society, Raimonds Staprāns is also well known as a playwright. He wrote nine plays in Latvian — “Sasalšana” (Freezing, 1980), “Briedis-Peterss” (1992), “Gūsteknis pilī” (Prisoner in the Castle, 1998), “Anšlavs and Veronika” (2000), “Dr. Paula Kalniņa tiesāšana” (The Trial of Dr. Paul Kalniņš, 2006) and others — while his greatest public acclaim came with “Četras dienas jūnijā” (Four Days in June, 1989).

Text: Elita Ansone