13.10.–18.10..2026
The exhibition is open to visitors free of charge during the museum’s opening hours.
To mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of artist Raimonds Staprāns, a selection of his works from the Zuzāns Collection will be on view on the first floor of Zuzeum Art Museum.
In Staprāns’s work, the ordinary is transformed to a threshold at which the object remains recognisable, yet its presence is increasingly determined by colour, form, and spatial relationships. A boat, a fruit, a chair, a jug, a barn, or a distant horizon serves at once as a recognizable object and a means of exploring tone, scale, balance, and spatial tension.
The works represented in the Zuzāns Collection reveal how, over several decades, Staprāns consistently narrowed his range of motifs and means of expression while simultaneously heightening their intensity. The loose, at times expressive construction of his early works gradually evolved into a more controlled visual language, in which every plane, contour, tonal transition, and empty field is carefully weighted.
Staprāns’s artistic thinking took shape on the West Coast of post-war America, where he came to understand abstraction not as a rejection of the visible world but as a means of testing the structure of figurative painting. He retained only what the painting required: a landscape could become a few bands and a horizon, a boat to an almost geometric body, while his characteristic elevated viewpoint transformed space into a system of planes. The fields of colour in Nicolas de Staël (1914–1955), the diagonals of Richard Diebenkorn (1922–1993), and Wayne Thiebaud’s (1920–2021) sense of light served Staprāns as individual painterly tools rather than as styles to be adopted, allowing his work to remain distinct even within the context of the Bay Area Figurative Movement. One of the key sources of tension in his work is undoubtedly colour: the relationships between tones and the sharp Californian light both emphasise and flatten forms, at times bringing them close to abstraction.
The seeming clarity of his compositions emerged through a long and intuitive process. Staprāns returned to his canvases over months or even years, altering colours, painting over forms, and testing what might still be superfluous. The visible traces of repainting are therefore not merely records of the working process, but part of the image itself, preserving the presence of earlier decisions and preventing the composition from becoming sterile.
Although his biography was shaped by exile and by a professional life within the American art world, Staprāns’s painting cannot be fully explained by either Latvian cultural experience or the context of post-war Californian art alone. The consistency of his painting ultimately rests on a paradox: the more he relinquishes description, detail, and narrative, the more intensely what remains begins to operate. Colour gains weight, the distance between objects acquires tension, and an empty plane becomes as physically present as the boat, chair, or piece of fruit placed within it; here, silence is not an absence of information, but a condition in which even the slightest shift in form or colour becomes audible.
In the year of Raimonds Staprāns’ centenary, his artistic practice and personality are explored through a series of interconnected events. On 18 October, Pēteris Krilovs’ documentary film The Red Barn (73 min., Latvia, 2026) will have its premiere as part of the RIGA IFF programme. The film connects Staprāns’ life experience, spanning almost a century, with the history of Latvia and Europe in the 20th century.
Documentary observation, archival material, and staged episodes create a space where the personal meets the political, San Francisco meets the Latvian coast, and the past continues its dialogue with the present. At the centre of the film is an image from Staprāns’ painting — the red barn — which takes on a tangible form and becomes a place where, alongside the artist’s life story, questions of freedom, power, and the artist’s responsibility in the face of history are explored.
Artwork: Raimonds Staprāns. Variation of the Ugly Hockney Vase. 2005. Zuzāns Collection.
Photo: Jānis Pipars