David Ligare’s artistic embrace of a classical model in a contemporary, and often conceptual, context reflects his belief in the “fundamental relevance” of ancient art. Born in 1945 in Oak Park, Illinois, Ligare received artistic training at the ArtCenter College of Design in Los Angeles, where as a high school student he took classes that developed his skills as a draftsperson and introduced him to theories of perspective. In 1963, while on a backpacking trip through Europe, Ligare visited Athens, Greece, igniting his love affair with classicism.

In the early 1970s, Ligare experimented with painting white draperies piled on a table and juxtaposed against a view of the ocean. Ligare then asked a friend to toss the drapery while he took photographs, capturing the point where the outstretched cloth was suspended in the air just before falling back down. He used the snapshots as the basis for his finished paintings but followed a systematic and highly geometric approach to constructing the compositions. Ligare has cited the influence on this body of work of John Baldessari’s 1973 Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, in which the artist threw three balls at the same time, trying to line them up midair, while his then-wife, Carol Wixom, photographed the process. As with all the paintings in Ligare’s Thrown Drapery series, Kimolos is named after a Greek island. The surreal and hauntingly beautiful composition exemplifies Ligare’s crystalline style and the seamless artistic “marriage of the ancient and the modern” found in his work.