Of Latvian descent, Edvins Strautmanis graduated from the School of the Institute of Chicago and began exhibiting in 1965. By 1971 he was in Soho NYC, where he embraced the influences of the 1950’s abstract expressionists such as Kline, DeKooning and Pollack.
His large scale action paintings, created with non-conventional tools, expressed the vitality and edginess of New York City. In July, 2019 at the Cesis Art Festival in Latvia, 15 of Strautmanis’s largest paintings were exhibited as part of his first ever comprehensive retrospective.
Collections include: The Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Phoenix Art Museum, the Kunsthaus in Zurich, the Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota Florida, and the Latvian National Museum of Art, Riga, Latvia.
