Caring for a Living: Aliza Nisenbaum’s NHS Portraits

Published by Los Angeles Review of Books | November 10, 2021

From the essay:

Nisenbaum’s paintings often juxtapose sumptuously hued portrayals of people with equally kaleidoscopic renderings of botanical life. Her individual and group portraits are typically produced during extensive in-person sittings, focusing on people who assemble, live, and work in diverse community structures. The artist intimately and porously attends to her sitters as she paints, asks questions, listens to their histories, and shares details of her own life with them. The feelings of liveness and immediacy that irradiate her portraits also resound in her paintings of flowers and other plants. Each flourish of petals, cluster of leaves, and outstretched stem invokes a continual presence-in-absence, the way a tenderly arranged, hand-delivered bouquet from a friend might.

These qualities become exceptionally palpable in Nisenbaum’s two group portraits, which feature members of an Emergency Department medical team from Alder Hey Children’s Hospital. Both depict “Team Time,” a series of gatherings organized by consultant physician Lalith Wijedoru and consultant clinical psychologist Jo Potier de la Morandiere wherein staff members shared stories of their pandemic experiences with each other. On the left side of Team Time Storytelling, Alder Hey Children’s Hospital Emergency Department, Covid Pandemic (2020), Wijedoru sits barefoot at a table covered with a laptop, file folders, and a colorful drawing on paper. The table tilts upward at an uncanny angle and its volumetric bulk appears out of place for the outdoor courtyard setting in which it stands. Housekeeper Sue Dewsbury echoes the table’s angle in her own posture as she leans against a green ledge with her legs outstretched. The ledge swoops into the lower half of the picture, flattening impossibly against the canvas before disappearing out of frame. It reappears (covered in more drawings rendered by sitters as part of Team Time exercises) above the picture’s bottom edge, then stretches leftward, providing a seat for Emergency Department Secretary Sarah Jones and Senior Pediatric Nurse Jodie Walton before receding back into the foreground. The picture’s mosaic of textural planes and subject positions refuses to coalesce in its shallow depths of field. While the curiously tabulated figural elements claim their own areas of the canvas, they still gently hold space for one another.

Nisenbaum considers these fractured perspectives and configurations as being akin to those of a theatrical tableau or stage set. In the vein of early practitioners of antifascist Dadaist photomontage like Hannah Höch, she sees representational forms in her paintings as existing within a matrix of political relations, hierarchies, and narratives, all apt for recombination and realignment. Infused with this spirit of collage, her group portraits operate as disjointed history paintings. Their fragmentary spaces eschew any grand, linear narrative, instead remaining attuned to how the communities that she paints form, unform, and reform their own social contours. It’s within these ephemeral spaces — both on and off the canvas, inside and outside the capitalist structures in which she and her subjects live and work — that seeds of revolutionary thinking, what Nisenbaum calls “casual moments of resistance,” can germinate.

Images, from top to bottom (all works by Aliza Nisenbaum):

Team Time Storytelling, Alder Hey Children's Hospital Emergency Department, Covid Pandemic, 2020

Poppy Blooms and Jessica, Student Nurse, 2020

Stephen, Orthoptist, and Agapanthus, 2020