Blonde Nurses

Oil on canvas, dimensions variable, 1998–ongoing

… participates in the politics of representation – right here, right now – by focusing on the slowness and stillness of the medium: another splendid example of how painting’s supposed disadvantages are turned to its advantage. A starting point for his series “Blond Nurses” is the anti-racist uproar in the British media concerning the proliferation of blond nurses working in hospitals at the end of the ‘9Os. These populist xenophobic claims repeated the usual story about how the foreigners take our jobs etc., but this time the clash was about blond nurses particularly in hospitals in London, who often come from Finland and Poland. They are an extremely uncanny series of mysterious, bland, and feeble paintings (yet powerful in their powerlessness). They are about racism, the symbolic horizon activated by the image of nurses, of healing and of helping others.

Mika Hannula, Flash Art, October, 2OO2

His ranks of homogenised nursing staff tend to patients with all the plastic insubstantiality of first-aid dummies, … There is something cultish and mesmerised in their behaviour, giving dark edge to the apparently humorous original conceit; these women are after all, the modern angels of life and death.

Hettie Judah, Time out Istanbul, May 2OO2

Exhibited:

  • Reykjavik Art Museum
  • Kopavogur Art Museum
  • North Dakota Art Museum
  • Proje4L, Istanbul
  • Hangar-7, Salzburg
  • Various Galleries in Iceland and abroad