Pace has announced worldwide representation of artist and filmmaker David Lynch. For over five decades, Lynch has nurtured a multidisciplinary practice that stems from his early work as a painter and spans painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, music, and film. From November 4 to December 17, we will present an exhibition of new and recent work by Lynch at our flagship gallery in New York, marking the artist’s first show with our gallery.
Lynch’s artworks often meditate on moments of disruption in domestic, everyday settings. Rife with unsettling, threatening, and enigmatic images, the artist’s work draws from the visual languages of Surrealism and Art Brut. Bringing madcap forms and media into conversation, Lynch’s semi-abstract paintings, which often feature flattened compositions and perspectival distortions, explore enactments of bodily and industrial decay. At the core of these works is a pervasive unease that speaks to the dark realities of contemporary American life.
The artist’s first exhibition with Pace—bringing together disquieting scenes on wood panel and paper as well as sculptures with light components—will spotlight his storytelling abilities. Lynch’s artworks often meditate on moments of disruption in domestic, everyday settings. Rife with unsettling, threatening, and enigmatic images, the artist’s work draws from the visual languages of Surrealism and Art Brut. Bringing madcap forms and media into conversation, Lynch’s semi-abstract paintings, which often feature flattened compositions and perspectival distortions, explore enactments of bodily and industrial decay. At the core of these works is a pervasive unease that speaks to the dark realities of contemporary American life.
Among the paintings included in Lynch’s forthcoming show with Pace is Airplane in Sky / Ant (2022), a fantastical tableau depicting a distressed ant at its center and incorporating playful textual elements. “It comes with the idea and it’s the idea that starts you, and then it’s this process of action and reaction,” Lynch has said of his approach to painting. “This is the thing you hope to keep alive. And there’s got to be a freedom to say, that didn’t work, it’s got to go. Then in the process of destruction, a beautiful new thing can emerge…random things, random choices and then—bang, an idea comes.”
A selection of Lynch’s mixed media lamp sculptures will also figure prominently in the exhibition. These works— forged with various combinations of steel, wood, resin, plexiglass, and plaster—are derived from the artist’s early paintings and experimentations with projection and moving images. Depending on their material makeups, these structures range from linear to geometric to biomorphic. “Electricity is so thrilling and think about wood…Nature supplies this for us, all different kinds of wood, and the structure of it can be sawed, sanded, shaped, polished, turned into furniture, so many things like houses,” Lynch has said of his fascination with the sculptures’ materiality.
