The Golden Hour

“It has been said that the Roman poet Virgil invented the evening because he used it to such lasting effect in his pastoral poems,” says David Ligare on the occasion of his first solo exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Modern. “This threshold between day and night is often referred to as ‘the golden hour.’ I love the radical beauty of this late afternoon light with its attendant shadows because, despite its brightness, there is a melancholic edge to it, a reminder of mortality. Always low and at a right angle to the viewer, my positioning of sunlight maximizes form and presents the subject as half-light, half shadow. This balance of opposites, for me, is the essence of Greco-Roman Classicism.