The Japanese painter Yu Nishimura, born in Kanagawa in 1982, has gone from a quietly admired figure on the Paris and Tokyo circuits to one of the most talked-about painters working today, with a major auction result, a high-profile placement at Art Basel and a string of institutional shows all landing within the space of a year. This week his London gallery, Sadie Coles HQ, opens Dislocation at its Kingly Street space, running until 22 August, ahead of an even bigger milestone in the autumn: his first major European institutional show, opening at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris this October.
Nishimura’s work has always traded in a kind of productive instability, and Dislocation takes that quality and makes it the explicit subject of the show. The paintings here are built up through repeated revision, with earlier marks, abandoned compositions and corrections left visible beneath and alongside the final image. Rather than aiming for a tidy, resolved picture, Nishimura treats each canvas as an ongoing negotiation, one he has described less as a search for completion than as a continuing conversation with the work itself, where erasure and change are themselves sources of new meaning.
That approach extends to how the paintings handle space. Landscapes and interiors recur throughout, but they avoid functioning as portraits of any specific place. Instead, the viewer’s sense of distance from what’s depicted keeps shifting, pulled in close and then pushed back, so that figures, buildings and objects feel oddly suspended, never quite anchored, both recognisable and slightly out of reach. The palette throughout leans towards muted ochres and earth tones, lending the works a faded, almost vintage quality that reinforces the sense of suspended time running through the show.
Underneath this formal approach sits a more personal thread. Nishimura draws on family photographs, scraps of urban scenery and anonymous figures, reworking them into hazy, atmospheric scenes that hover between private memory and something more generic and shared. Even the stillest images carry a sense of latent movement, as though caught mid-thought. The result is less a set of stories than a network of loose connections, between near and far, past and present, the personal and the anonymous, with the title’s “dislocation” describing not a single break but an ongoing state of flux that runs through perception, identity and the paintings themselves.
Coming at a moment when international attention on Nishimura’s work is intensifying rapidly, Dislocation offers a useful chance to see this celebrated painter’s methods up close, in some of the more reflective and process-driven works he has shown in London to date.
Yu Nishimura: Dislocation is at Sadie Coles HQ, 62 Kingly Street, London, to 22 August 2026.
Header:
Yu Nishimura, ‘when the wings lifted’, 2026
Courtesy Sadie Coles/the artist ©
