Yu Nishimura
In Slight Shift, 2025
Art Basel Unlimited
16 - 22 June 2025
Sadie Coles HQ and Crèvecoeur
For Art Basel Unlimited 2025, Yu Nishimura’s painting focuses on landscape, a motif the artist has been exploring and researching for the past 20 years.
‘I spent a lot of time in such landscapes in my childhood. Not the so-called great nature, but the abandoned woods and vacant land ofunderdevelopment. The small nature in the urban space has formed the landscape of my primary experience. When I paint something, there is always a memory of this landscape behind me. Gazing into the bushes, I would find small creatures without trying to see them. To see the deepest part of the painting, I look for the shapes I know.’ – Yu Nishimura
Yu Nishimura (b. 1982, Kanagawa, Japan) graduated from Tama Art University in 2004 and lives and works in Kanagawa. Nishimura focuses his practice on finding the visual and conceptual centre of a painting and capturing the essence of a ‘portrait’ beyond traditional ideas of human figuration. Nishimura uses traditional techniques working with oil and tempera yet cites his inspirers as predominantly photographers, forming a painterly style that echoes Japanese anime and street photography. In constant dialogue with the canvas, the artist employs brushwork that has a fluid and dreamlike effect in a process of superimposing layers of painterly elements, overlapping and misaligning lucid figures, vast planes of colour and scenic landscapes that manifest as blurred or fleeting memories. Nishimura’s oeuvre recounts the aura of everyday life as he spectates and then reconstructs his surroundings, gently manipulating mundane environments into rich and emotional pictorial space.
© Yu Nishimura. Courtesy the Artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London.