10 Must-See Gallery Shows to Catch in New York This May
- David Zwirner
- Through June 27, 2025
In just a few years, Japanese artist Yu Nishimura has risen to international prominence, captivating collectors with his lyrical, often melancholic paintings suspended in a hazy, ethereal atmosphere—works that mirror similarly blurred psychological and emotional states. At once dreamy and eerie, his scenes disrupt the logical tension between what is felt and what is perceived, translating, through minimal painterly gestures, a complex set of silent feelings and desires that emerge directly from the depths of the unconscious.
For his debut exhibition with the gallery—also his first solo show in the United States—he presents a new poetic body of work characterized by his distinctive blending of traditional Japanese landscape, the simplification of characters found in manga and anime and the framing techniques of cinema. Combining traditional oil and tempera with visual impulses drawn from trailblazing postwar Japanese photography, Nishimura creates paintings that feel both disarmingly simple and universally resonant, as if a memory is sleeping just out of reach, a feeling we try to recall, a melancholic reminiscence surfacing from the nebulous abysses of our subconscious. The show follows his recent auction breakthrough, marked by the sale of Sandy beach (2020) for $296,100 at Christie’s New York—far surpassing its pre-sale estimate of $40,000–$60,000. That result followed an earlier meteoric 125 percent jump in value, when his work Pause (2020) fetched $132,000—almost double its high estimate of $70,000.
