‘David Lynch: LA’ preview – a brand new pictures present at Pace

When pondering the greater than 50-year profession of filmmaker and artist David Lynch (1946-2025), lightness shouldn’t be the very first thing that involves thoughts. Who can overlook the haunting suburban scene of Dennis Hopper respiration psychotically into a transparent plastic fuel masks earlier than groping Isabella Rossellini within the ground-breaking Eighties neo-noir thriller movie Blue Velvet? The human cruelty bestowed upon The Elephant Man or the grim industrial trappings of Eraserhead – which put Lynch on the map within the late Seventies, and left an indelible mark on the business. But the sunshine – and artistic chance – that he found in Los Angeles, the place he lived for over 5 many years, with the picturesque sprawling metropolis and its underbelly as his muse and inspiration, undoubtedly knowledgeable his work. For Lynch, town was ‘a feeling as much as it is a place’, in keeping with Pace, which opens a show of his photographs at its Los Angeles gallery on 19 September.

Titled ‘David Lynch: LA’, the exhibition bridges the emotional and bodily panorama between the myths and mysteries of town and its archetypes – the ingenue, the shapeshifter, the wonder, and darkness. The artist’s blurred actuality and surrealist slant in movies and tv initiatives, known as ‘Lynchian’, are additionally evident on this assortment of pictures that highlight his distinctive creative sensibility in a medium that bridges his vital contributions to portray and movie.

(Image credit score: © The David Lynch Estate. Courtesy The David Lynch Estate and Pace Gallery)

Lynch is credited for bringing experimentalism to mainstream media within the late twentieth century, and was bestowed with a slew of prizes, together with an Honorary Academy Award, a BAFTA, the Cannes Film Festival Best Director Award for Mulholland Drive (2001), and the Palm d’Or for Wild at Heart (1990), together with a Golden Globe for his Nineteen Nineties tv collection Twin Peaks.

Lynch, born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, moved to Los Angeles in 1972 as a fellow at The American Film Institute, the place he arrange a studio within the stables on the Greystone Mansion campus in Beverly Hills for 4 years. Over the years, Lynch additionally labored as an animator, an writer, a furnishings designer, and a musician. His skills spanned directing music movies for Moby and Nine Inch Nails, and commercials for Dior, Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent. His appearing roles embody enjoying movie director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s drama movie The Fabelmans, in 2022.

(Image credit score: © The David Lynch Estate. Courtesy The David Lynch Estate and Pace Gallery)

Because of all his moving-image accolades, many movie followers don’t realise that Lynch truly needed to be a painter. Before his transfer to LA, he was influenced by Francis Bacon whereas an artwork pupil on the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, when he started creating brief movies out of a need to impact motion in his work.

‘David Lynch had an incredibly rich and sustained art practice that began in childhood, continued through art school in the 1960s, and remained an essential part of his life for nearly 60 years,’ says Genevieve Day, senior director at Pace in Los Angeles.

With previous exhibitions from the artist spanning different globally recognised galleries in Tokyo, London, Paris, Milan and Moscow, Lynch joined Pace in 2022, marking his debut with the solo exhibition ‘Big Bongo Night’ in New York, featuring mixed-media sculptures, paintings, and a work on paper.

Now, it felt important for Pace to honour the commitment Lynch devoted to this practice, and to have this new show take place in his chosen home since 1972. ‘This exhibition, focusing specifically on Lynch’s photo-based work, is a prelude to a much broader retrospective that LACMA is in the early stages of preparing,’ says Day.

(Image credit: © The David Lynch Estate. Courtesy The David Lynch Estate and Pace Gallery)

This continues the thread of Los Angeles, which became a defining presence in Lynch’s imagination. ‘It traces the atmospheric feeling of the city through his early 1979 black and white “portraits” of the distinctive architecture of Los Angeles, to his continued study of the nude, in which the female body becomes abstracted and visually topographical,’ says Day. ‘Later, he digitally manipulated his photographs, creating a contemporary odalisque – the reclining figure of art-historical tradition. The five large-scale colour photographs of women and smoke expand on this idea of the surreal, vivid in our imagination. Each work has a distinctive quality, but together reveal Lynch’s broader vision.’

As seen in the provocative red lips with a wafting cloud of smoke, Lynch captures these images as a moment of ecstasy. In stark contrast, smoke is also seen as a plume rising from a drab 1950s-style sofa with chintz floral drapery in the background. Ironically, Lynch was a lifelong chain smoker, and, already suffering from emphysema, he died in 2025 following evacuation during the devastating Southern California wildfires that swept through the city that same year.

(Image credit: © The David Lynch Estate. Courtesy The David Lynch Estate and Pace Gallery)

In the many years that Pace has been involved with Lynch and his artwork – most recently with two 2026 group exhibitions in Berlin – there are still surprises to uncover. ‘Like the best artists, there is a mystery in his work that becomes both illuminating and more confounding the more closely you look,’ says Day. ‘He was a storyteller – some images are overt, while others are much more enigmatic, leaving space for the viewer to create their own narrative.

‘I hope people come away with a deeper understanding of David Lynch as a visual artist,’ adds Day. ‘His photography was only one aspect of his immense creative practice as an artist whose vision found expression across many different mediums.’

‘David Lynch: LA ’at Pace Los Angeles, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, 19 September – 24 October 2026

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(Image credit score: © The David Lynch Estate. Courtesy The David Lynch Estate and Pace Gallery)