Yu Nishimura: the Towards the Sea exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations

Japanese artist Yu Nishimura unveils the exhibition Towards the Sea at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris, running from October 21, 2026 to January 3, 2027. For his first institutional monographic show in France, the painter brings together roughly fifty works around landscape, memory, and the sea. A contemporary art encounter where images seem to move between memory, apparition, and the horizon line.

The exhibition brings together about fifty works, spanning drawings and large-scale paintings created in the last decade, some conceived especially for the venue. It features human, animal, botanical, or mineral presences, set in calm, sometimes almost floating scenes. The sea threads through the show as a discreet undercurrent: glimpsed from a train, edged with sand, hidden behind trees or houses, it accompanies the compositions like a memory that stubbornly lingers.

• To be read
• What to see in Paris in October 2026: the standout exhibitions worth checking out in the capital right now
• Lafayette Anticipations: opening hours, prices... everything you need to know about the contemporary art foundation
• Top picks of the week: October 19–25, 2026 in Paris and Île-de-France

Yu Nishimura works with oil and tempera, borrowing from the language of photography and cinema. Blur, overlays, and tight, cropped frames—his images move in fragments. A face, a silhouette, an animal head, a bicycle wheel, or a reflection of clouds can become the entry point to a painting. The gaze travels freely, guided by a meditative stroll that folds portraiture, landscape, and still life into one journey. And his playful signature: in every exhibition, he includes a cat’s portrait in the opening rooms.

Curated by Elsa Coustou, Towards the Sea presents a painting of the in-between, attentive to simple forms, to everyday details, and to what escapes an instant reading. At Lafayette Anticipations, the show invites you to slow down before quiet images, where it’s never entirely clear whether you’re looking at a landscape, a memory, or a vision.

This page may contain AI-assisted elements, more information here.