21 October 2026 — 3 January 2027

Yu Nishimura: Towards a Sea

Lafayette Anticipations presents Towards a Sea, the first institutional solo exhibition in France by the Japanese painter Yu Nishimura. It brings together some fifty works made over the past ten years, from drawings to large-scale paintings, several of them created specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition follows Nishimura’s exploration of landscape as a space inhabited by presences and often bordered by the sea. Glimpsed from a train window or half-hidden behind trees and houses, the sea has been a constant in the artist’s life since childhood. Conceived as a meditative walk, the show weaves together human and animal figures with plant and mineral motifs that overlap with the marine element. In his works, as in memory, imagination merges with reality in enigmatic images where places seep into and haunt the figures. Working in oil and tempera, Nishimura carries principles from photography and cinema into painting, revisiting the Western genres of portraiture, landscape and still life. Through blurring and layering he gives his pictures a dreamlike, evanescent quality and a quiet sense of strangeness. Drawn to many details at once, the eye drifts from one motif to the next – from a close-up portrait to a full-length silhouette, from a human face to an animal’s head, from a bicycle wheel to clouds reflected on the sea. Much of his work draws on the idea of the “portrait”, which for Nishimura is not limited to people but extends to a quality found in many kinds of painted scene: a figure walking alone through a forest, animals going about their business, a car speeding past, or elements of the landscape itself. A defining feature of his paintings is their construction from superimposed layers of pictorial elements – the outline of a figure, swathes of colour – each slightly offset, so that the image becomes fluid and produces an afterimage effect. Towards a Sea reveals the artist’s attention to the beauty of the ordinary and the minute, and to the mysterious, complex nature of beings and things. Each work speaks of the transience of what surrounds us and passes through us, capturing a world held in suspension. Nishimura’s recent and upcoming solo exhibitions include Lafayette Anticipations and Crèvecœur in Paris, David Zwirner in New York, Castle in Los Angeles, ARCH in Athens, Sadie Coles HQ in London, La Società Delle Api in Monaco, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Busan.

Lafayette Anticipations