Taking Care

Aliza Nisenbaum is an internationally acclaimed painter best known for her bright, large-scale portraits of community groups. Inspired by the dedication of Liverpool’s key workers, the artist decided to create a series of new paintings of NHS staff from Merseyside who have worked tirelessly for their community during the pandemic. In the summer of 2020, Nisenbaum contacted a few key members of Merseyside NHS staff, who agreed to sit for portraits. The staff included a professor of Outbreak Medicine, a respiratory doctor who became a father during the first wave, and a student nurse from a family of nurses who all chose to return to frontline work. Over the next few weeks, talking to them via video link from her studio in the US, Aliza Nisenbaum created a series of poignant and powerful portraits, with each sitter depicted with the things that sustained them and given them hope. This publication captures these extraordinary portraits together, and tells the stories of the sitters, revealing the impact of the pandemic on their jobs, and on their lives.