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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE David Ligare: Ritual Offerings Koplin Del Rio Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by David Ligare . This will be the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with Koplin Del Rio Gallery, as well as the inaugural exhibition of the gallery’s new location at 6031 Washington Blvd in Culver City. Despite shifting trends, Ligare has been making paintings based on Greco-Roman Classicism for over 25 years. Susan Landauer, curator at the San Jose Museum of Art has written that, " A reshuffling of tradition is characteristic of Ligare (who) never felt the need to qualify his embrace of tradition through irony or parody. Not only has he borrowed the stylistic techniques of Poussin and David, but he has adopted whole aspects of neoclassical ideology, notably his conviction in art's capacity to shed philosophical and epistemological insights." He believes that, while not rejecting any permutations of art, there is usefulness in trying to re-establish the literate picture. He has practiced what New York artist and critic, Sidney Tillim, called, "purposeful representation." In London last fall, Ligare presented the first in a new series of paintings based on images of ritual harvest offerings from ancient Greece and Rome. Operating on the premise that no writer on the origins of still life painting had yet noted the probability of such depictions, Ligare set out to state his thesis in paint. In the catalog for that exhibition, Michael Squire, research scholar at Trinity College, Cambridge, wrote that through a "fusion of academic and aesthetic interests, David Ligare invites us to look at ancient paintings afresh. Whereas conventional scholarship has tended to collapse the differences between surviving ancient images of fruit, vegetables and game and the still lifes that are so familiar to us from the later history of western art, part of David Ligare's project has been to recast these early images as strange and new to our modern eyes. He does so by drawing attention to the religious sentiment that he believes originally to have inspired their production and consumption." David Ligare's figures are also abstracted through idealization. He has made a careful study of the ancient concepts of harmonic proportion. In his catalog essay for an exhibition entitled "Artists of the Ideal: Nuovo Classicismo" at the Galleria d'Arte Moderna in Verona, Italy, Edward Lucie-Smith wrote that "Ligare is a highly intellectual artist, fascinated by systems of measure and proportion." David Ligare was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1945. His family moved to Los Angeles when he was five years old. After attending Art Center College of Design Ligare was drafted into the US Army. He was stationed near New York and began showing his paintings there in 1966. Since that time he has had over thirty solo exhibitions in New York, London, Los Angeles, Rome, San Francisco and elsewhere. His work is in numerous collections including The Museum of Modern Art, NY; The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; Gabinetto Designi e Stampi degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy; The M.H. DeYoung Museum, San Francisco, CA, The San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA and many others.
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For more information please call 310.836.9055 or email to info@koplindelrio.com |