David Ligare

Landscape with an Owl (ATHENE NOCTUA) (Owl of Athena)

2024

During a trip to Europe following his graduation from high school, a young David Ligare boldly walked up to the home of artist Salvador Dalí in Port Lligat, Spain, and knocked on the front door. Fortunately for Ligare, the legendary Surrealist was home. Even more fortunate, Dalí agreed to speak with him, and the two spent the afternoon chatting in his studio. Although it’s not known what they discussed, Ligare later became a painter. While his landscapes, still lifes and narrative oil paintings expand upon the realist tradition, the figures in his works are stylized — they’re polished and wholly free of imperfection.

Ligare was born in 1945 in Oak Park, Illinois. At the age of five years old, he moved with his family to California and, in later years, studied at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena.

In 1978, Ligare’s artistic style took shape after joining a group of artists who were intent on reviving narrative painting during a time dominated by Conceptualism, minimalism and Pop art. An essay fueled Ligare’s decision to base his style on narration by critic and painter Sidney Tillim titled “Notes on Narrative and History Painting,” which appeared in Artforum a year prior. Tillim had explained why narrative art was necessary, stating that “a didactic morality or its equivalent must similarly support and validate what comes down to a new — or renewed — effort to illustrate belief.”

Not only was Ligare inspired by the works of 17th-century painter Nicolas Poussin — a major figure in classical French Baroque art — but he also drew upon Greco-Roman classicism. Greek sculptor Polykleitos, mathematician Pythagoras, and Plato's philosophy and mythology helped shape his ideas of light, balance, symmetry, and harmony. His surroundings also inspired Ligare in Monterey County, California, where he is based — many of his paintings depict the California coast in the background.

Ligare has shown his works extensively, including in exhibitions at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art, the Fresno Art Museum, the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture in London. His paintings are part of the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Department of Drawings and Prints of the Uffizi in Florence, Italy.

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