Mendes Wood DM opens seven lakes, a solo exhibition by Shota Nakamura, at its Brussels space on Friday 30 October from 6pm to 9pm. The show runs through 9 January and is the Japanese-born, Berlin-based artist's first solo presentation with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in Belgium.

The exhibition returns to the desaturated, dreamlike terrain Nakamura works in, drawing as readily from memory as from observation. The Brussels space itself, with its fireplaces and separate rooms rather than a single white cube, shaped the artist's thinking about scale: much of the show is made up of medium and small formats, an antimonumentalist choice. As Nakamura puts it, with a small painting the viewer has to come physically closer, so a very small mark or a slight shift in colour can become surprisingly significant.

Lakes and clouds recur throughout. The lake paintings, all made in 2026, are often presided over by a single tone — red, cool grey, or acid yellow-green — with a horizontal line dividing water below from sky above, a pale band of light marking the division, sometimes framed by dark tree trunks or broken by a jagged shore. Nakamura treats the lake as a pictorial structure rather than a romantic or metaphor-laden site, and landscape as a subject that can pass unremarked while carrying the peacefulness of an ordinary experience.

Behind the apparent simplicity sits a rigorous discipline. Nakamura trains his watercolour practice at an even smaller format before carrying its immediacy and indeterminacy onto oil and canvas, and grey has become a particularly important colour for him precisely because it responds to the colours around it — placed next to green, a grey can suddenly appear slightly green. Born in Yamanashi, Japan, in 1987, Nakamura graduated from Musashino Art University in 2011 and lives and works in Berlin.