Yu Nishimura: the poetry of fleeting moments

Some painters approach the world by slowing it down. Yu Nishimura is one of them. Born in 1982 in Kanagawa, where he still lives and works, Nishimura has spent the past two decades developing a distinctive visual language attentive to the quieter registers of perception. 

Since the early 2000s, the artist has explored what might be described as an aesthetic of disappearance, focusing on what sits at the margins of attention: moments that are half-glimpsed, softened by time, or remembered imprecisely. Working primarily in oil and tempera, he builds images through the accumulation of slightly misaligned layers: fragments of figures, architecture, colour fields and outlines that never fully resolve into a single, fixed scene. Although his work strongly evokes a few distinct influences across the contemporary visual cultures of Japan and beyond—namely anime, street photography and cinema—the sensibility behind it remains unmistakably his.

Nishimura’s interest in partial vision is rooted in the urban and natural environments of Kanagawa. Influenced as much by Japanese pictorial tradition as by the subtleties of contemporary urban life, the artist often begins with blurred memories, personal photographs or places he has passed through without lingering.

His muted palette—beiges, greyish pinks, faded blues—reinforces this sense of images filtered through recollection rather than direct observation. Understated, the result is not a dramatic feeling of silence or absence but a subtle and poetic reflection on how vision actually behaves: selectively, cumulatively, and often imperfectly. Nishimura’s canvases do not aim for a single, authoritative reading. Instead, they accommodate shifts in attention, multiple impressions and the instability inherent in how images form internally before they reach articulation. Even when a figure appears, it tends to function less as a portrait subject than as an anchor point within a drifting composition. This restraint—and the refusal to force a conclusion onto the viewer—positions him apart from more declarative trends in figurative painting.

Formally, Nishimura’s practice revolves around locating an image’s visual centre. The artist draws on photographic techniques that focus sharply on one element while allowing other areas to recede into softer, less defined space. He applies thin layers of oil paint, frequently sanding or wiping them back, producing surfaces that retain earlier marks while introducing new ones. This method creates the slight shifts and overlaps that have become characteristic of his work. At the same time, certain compositional decisions—simplified contours, graphic edges, flattened areas of colour—subtly reflect the influence of manga and anime. The combination paradoxically gives his work a hybrid form of clarity. Visually structured through contemporary cultural filters, but taking advantage of the formal qualities of painting, they manage to directly express his sensitive outlook on life—one that is shaped by memory, nostalgia and an acute sense of observation.

In recent years, Nishimura’s work has gained notable international momentum. He was initially represented solely by Galerie Crèvecœur in Paris, but his paintings soon appeared in several significant solo and group exhibitions. In 2024, “Synopsis” at Sadie Coles HQ in London introduced a series of works where softly graded colour fields met the layered instability of his figuration. Later that year, Subject Seconds, a two-person show with Magnus Frederik Clausen at David Zwirner Los Angeles, highlighted the temporal nature of his process—how an image can appear to have been assembled across sequential moments.

More recently, in April 2025, David Zwirner opened an exhibition of his work in New York, shortly before officially announcing it would be representing him in May 2025. Nishimura’s paintings are already held in important institutional collections in Japan and abroad, reflecting his rapidly expanding recognition within the contemporary art scene.

Yu Nishimura exhibition at David Zwirner New York in May 2025

Lastly, the artist has had quite a breakthrough at auctions these last few months. In November 2024, his painting Pause (2020) broke the $100,000 threshold at Sotheby’s in New York.

Thicket (2020) by Yu Nishimura

Since then, 6 other paintings have broken that record at auctions in London and New York. Marin drive (after the rain) (2017) reached a price of $279,400 at Phillips in May, before Across the place (2023)—one of the artist’s original paintings presenting a figure embedded in a gigantic face—broke the $400,000 threshold two days later at Sotheby’s. Even more recently, on November 18, the painting Thicket (2020) gathered $711,200 at Sotheby’s latest “The Now & Contemporary Evening Auction”. Showing a figure staring back at us in the forest, this beautiful picture exemplifies the painter’s practice in more than one way: embedding a focal point into the picture, several layers build up the forest around the figure in an evanescent fashion, suggesting a scene surging from the painter’s memory.