Saper Aude. Dare to be wise. Immanuel Kant’s directive is embodied in the work of David Ligare. For thirty-five 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. His work is earnest and in History, his second solo exhibition with Hirschl & Adler Modern, Ligare engages us to renew our own desire for knowledge. Elegantly painted, these fourteen oil on canvas works are generous offerings to Ligare’s theme of recurrent Classicism. In Magna Fide (The Great Belief), the artist places on the altar of the simple seaside shrine a golden sphere, a reference to Leon Battista Alberti and his belief of the sphere as representing “wholeness” itself. However, the wholeness is upset by the shrine’s mysterious surrounding – a rocky

Read More: Exhibition of fourteen oil on canvas works by David Ligare on view at Hirschl & Adler Modern