LONDON.- Throughout the development of Dislocation, Yu Nishimura articulated an approach to painting grounded in temporal, spatial, and psychological displacement. Across the exhibition, images emerge through layers of revision, interruption, and residual marks, producing compositions that resist fixed resolution and instead remain suspended between memory, perception and reconstruction.
Place and landscape are strongly present, yet rather than depicting specific locations, the paintings allow the gaze and the body to enter the landscape itself — moving closer to the subject and then withdrawing again, gradually shaping a felt sense of space. This shifting proximity produces a quiet recalibration of the viewer’s position where distance is never stable but continuously negotiated. Figures, landscapes, objects and architectural details appear partially detached, occupying uncertain spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and remote.
The title Dislocation reflects not only the thematic atmosphere of the exhibition, but also Nishimura’s material process. Tonal compositions in earthy, ochre colours are at once anachronistic and nostalgic and emphasise conditions of waiting, distance and interior suspension. This sense of dislocation is further reinforced through Nishimura’s palimpsestic method of painting. Earlier gestures, collapsed images, erased forms and compositional corrections remain visible on the canvas and coexist with accrued layers of pigment and time. Familiar environments are carefully destabilised through shifts in scale, perspective and ambiguity. The artist describes this process not as pursuing completion, but as sustaining an ongoing dialogue with the painting, where destruction, revision and incompletion allow opportunities for new forms and meaning.
The exhibition also reveals a subtle tension between personal memory and collective imagery. Family photographs, fragments of urban landscapes and anonymous solitary figures are reconstituted in atmospheric environments. Even moments of apparent stillness retain an underlying sense of movement or psychological drift. Rather than presenting coherent narratives, Dislocation constructs a field of discontinuous relations — between foreground and background, past and present, intimacy and estrangement, image and memory. It is within these shifting conditions that the exhibition’s title finds its most precise articulation: not as rupture alone, but as a state in which perception, identity and painting remain in continuous flux.
Yu Nishimura (b. 1982, Kanagawa) graduated from Tama Art University in 2004 and lives and works in Kanagawa. In October 2026, the artist will open his first major European institutional exhibition at Lafayette Anticipations, Paris.
Recent solo presentations include the Rubell Museum, Miami (2025); Sleep Walk, ARCH Athens (2024); The Sequel: Twin Boat Songs – Verdigris Vessel, with Kazuyuki Takezaki, Echigo Tsumari, Tōkamachi (2023); December Light, La Società delle Api, Monaco (2023); Aperto 09 Nishimura Yu-paragraph, Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Ishikawa (2018); and project N 61, Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery, Tokyo (2015).
