SAPERE AUDE. Dare to be wise. Immanuel Kant’s directive is embodied in the work of David Ligare. For forty years, Ligare has dedicated his work to classicist ideals: Truth, Beauty, Balance, Form. With full awareness of duplicitous and shifting contexts surrounding contemporary art, the artist pursues these ideals without irony and engages us to renew our own desire for knowledge.           

David Ligare (born 1945, Oak Park, IL) studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He has shown his paintings in many solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles, London, Rome, San Francisco, Seattle, and elsewhere. His work can be found in numerous permanent collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT; the Frye Art Museum, Seattle; and the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy. In June 2015, the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA presented the retrospective, David Ligare: California Classicist. This traveling exhibition was accompanied by a major monograph on the artist. Ligare lives and works in Carmel, CA.