David Ligare
American painter (born 1945)
David Ligare (born 1945) is a California-based representational painter of landscape, figurative and still life works. His paintings employ formal principles and ideas from Greco-Roman art and Classical history painting in the service of philosophical contemplations of contemporary existence. He has sometimes been characterized as a photorealist, however, many critics reject that categorization. They identify an uncanny, timeless element in his work focused on moral concerns, the past and idealized subjects rather than the reproduction of photographic reality, which belies the photorealist label. Critic Donald Kuspit termed Ligare's paintings "covertly abstract as well as overtly realistic, and thus peculiarly surreal. Formally beautiful as well as insightfully true to appearances, and responsible to the cultural heritage of Classical antiquity, they fuse modernism and traditionalism."
Ligare's work belongs to the public collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, de Young Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, and Smithsonian American Art Museum. He has appeared in surveys at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum in Gdansk (Poland) and National Pinakothiki (Athens, Greece), and had solo exhibitions at the Crocker Art Museum, Georgia Museum of Art, Monterey Museum of Art and Laguna Art Museum, among other venues.
He has lived in the Monterey region of California since the late 1960s and is based in the Carmel Valley.
Life and career
Ligare was born in 1945 in Oak Park, Illinois and moved with his family to Manhattan Beach, California at age five. He painted from an early age; a backpacking trip through Europe after high school sparked his interested in classical art.
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This entry incorporates text from “David Ligare” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.