Creativity's UK · March 27, 2025
Art Liard's Ode to the Ephemeral
By Maria Bregman
Critic and curator Maria Bregman places Art Liard in the lineage of Wyeth, Hammershøi and Morandi — an artist who turns the everyday into quiet, contemporary poetry.
In a feature for Creativity's UK, the internationally recognised art critic, curator and cultural producer Maria Bregman — founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine, and a juror for prizes including the Vasily Kandinsky Art Prize — examined Art Liard's painting as "a quiet yet profound exploration of memory, solitude, and the poetry of the everyday."
Bregman read three works closely. In The Scarf (2025) she found "an achingly tender homage to memory, where fabric becomes a vessel for the unseen," comparing its emotional charge to Andrew Wyeth's Christina's World and the hushed interiors of Vilhelm Hammershøi. In Raccoon and Rabbit (2024) she saw "a masterful tension between kinship and isolation," echoing Edward Hopper and Gerhard Richter. And in The Coffeepot she traced "the ghost of Giorgio Morandi," transformed by Liard's loose, contemporary touch.
In Art Liard's hands, nostalgia is not a retreat but a dialogue.
— Maria Bregman, Creativity's UK
Her verdict placed Liard firmly among serious contemporary painters: work that "does not shout but lingers, inviting viewers to lean in — and in doing so, to rediscover their own buried narratives."