This summer, the Crocker Art Museum presents a major retrospective exhibition, featuring nearly 80 works by Monterey Peninsula-based contemporary artist David Ligare. The exhibition, David Ligare: California Classicist, is on view June 7 through September 20, 2015. A self-proclaimed Classicist, Ligare (born 1945) creates perfectly ordered still life, landscape, architectural, and figurative paintings that occupy their own poetic world. Although often grouped with California’s Photorealists, the very unreality of 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. In achieving these qualities, Ligare looks to the ancients for guidance and references the formal relationships found in Classical sculpture and architecture. And yet his paintings are firmly based in the specifics of C

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