The Intimacy of Care

Banner Image: Installation view of Justine Di Fiore, Nurse, 2026, Oil on canvas 50 x 41 in (left) and Justine Di Fiore, Caring Is a Longing, 2026, Oil on canvas, 271⁄2 x 24 in.

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To live in a body is to be in constant relation with the world. It is how we move, how we’re seen, how we understand ourselves in proximity to others. The body carries memory, desire, and perception all at once. It shapes how we’re received and, over time, how we learn to receive ourselves. And yet, rarely are we allowed to define our bodies in our own terms. It becomes something negotiated between self and other, between interior feeling and external gaze. 

In Justine Di Fiore's latest exhibition, “Urgent Care,” bodies are not presented in the way we’ve been taught to look at them. Di Fiore draws from nearly three decades of work as a nursing assistant to reshape how the body is seen and understood. Her paintings resist the long history of the body as spectacle (particularly the female-presenting body) and instead move toward something more immediate and tactile. 

 

Installation view: Justine Di Fiore, Caring Is a Longing, 2026, Oil on canvas, 271⁄2 x 24 in.

“I wasn't approaching drawing or painting the body through a Western figure study model where you’re sort of separate from the figure, and observing the figure from a kind of cool, distant perspective,” she says. “My perspective, I realized, was different, and shifted towards a more up-close, intimate perspective of care.” 

What emerges from that shift is a different way of painting, but also a different way of looking. Di Fiore’s figures are often faceless, their identities slightly blurred or obscured. Without a fixed expression to guide interpretation, the focus moves to gesture, to touch, to the relationship between bodies. The paintings refuse the easy consumption of the figure because they are not about beauty, nor are they concerned with ideal form. Instead, they hold space for the body as something lived in, something vulnerable, and something in need of care. 

That sense of care is not abstract; it is rooted in labor. As a nursing assistant Di Fiore worked in a hospital, performing the kinds of tasks that often go unseen — a perspective that deeply informs her work. 

 

Justine Di Fiore, Caring Is a Longing, 2026, Oil on canvas, 271⁄2 x 24 in.

“I became really interested in touch. The marks in my work have a lot more tactile, physical, and energetic presentation because I'm thinking about what it felt like to wash a body, as opposed to rendering in the traditional sense.” 

Washing, lifting, turning, holding. There is a trust embedded in that kind of touch and Di Fiore’s paintings hold onto that exchange. It asks the viewer to consider what it means to be responsible for another person’s body and, in turn, what it means to place your own body in someone else’s care.

 

Installation view: top row (left to right) Urgent Care 2, Urgent Care 1, and Urgent Care 4. Bottom row (left to right): Urgent Care 12, Urgent Care 11, and Urgent Care 6. All oil on yupo, 14 x 11 in.

At a time when care itself feels increasingly strained — politically, socially, and institutionally — “Urgent Care” takes on a sharper resonance. Di Fiore speaks directly to this tension, recalling the recent images of violence and displacement. 

“I started seeing, in Los Angeles, some of the first immigration raids that were happening in the fashion district,” she says. “I saw these images on my phone of people being taken away from establishments that weren't far from where I was working, and it was just bodies being pulled, grabbed, thrown, drawn through the street, tackled, chased, ripped away from their children. It was the antithesis of care, the antithesis of tenderness and compassion.” 

I walk away from the “Urgent Care” exhibition understanding that the bodies in these pieces are not only depictions of care, but assertions of it. And that’s where the urgency lies, in the possibility that care, even now, can still be practiced, still be learned, still be extended.◼︎ 

Urgent care is on view at Dreamsong from March 21 – May 2, 2026. There will be an artist talk with Justine Di Fiore & Amy K. Hamlin 8 at 3PM in the gallery. Dreamsong is located at 1237 4th Street NE Minneapolis, MN 55413.