Lafayette Anticipations in Paris will open 'Towards a Sea' on 21 October 2026, the first institutional solo exhibition in France by Japanese painter Yu Nishimura. Curated by Elsa Coustou, the show runs through 3 January 2027 and gathers around fifty works spanning ten years of practice, from drawings to large-scale paintings, including new pieces made specifically for the occasion.

The exhibition centres on Nishimura's long-standing exploration of landscape as a space inhabited by presences and often bordered by the sea. The sea has accompanied the artist since his childhood in Kanagawa, glimpsed from train windows or half-hidden behind trees and houses, and his work returns to it as a constant, enigmatic presence. Conceived as a meditative stroll, the hang weaves together human and animal figures with plant and mineral motifs that overlap with the marine element.

Working in oil and tempera, Nishimura transposes photographic and cinematographic principles into painting, revisiting the Western genres of portraiture, landscape and still life. Through blurring and layering, his images acquire a dreamlike, evanescent quality, extending the idea of the portrait beyond the human figure to an animal, a lone walker or a moving car.

The show opens to coincide with Art Basel Paris week, when the capital's exhibition calendar is at its busiest. Born in 1982 in Kanagawa, where he still lives and works, Nishimura has in recent years shown at the Rubell Museum in Miami, ARCH Athens and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, building a reputation for atmospheric paintings in which memory and the imaginary merge.