David Ligare: California Classicist

This retrospective exhibition of self-proclaimed classicist David Ligare (b. 1945), organized by the Crocker Art Museum of Sacramento, California, represented Ligare’s perfectly ordered still-life, landscape, architectural and figurative paintings that occupy their own poetic world. Although often grouped with California’s photorealists, Ligare’s paintings and his underlying interest in antiquity belie such a label, and the perfection of his unblemished subjects and hyper-purity of his paint application seem more unearthly than real. And yet, his paintings are firmly based in the specifics of California — and the Monterey region in particular — allowing Ligare to create art that is broadly universal and yet specifically of our time and place.