David Lynch Posthumous Photograph Exhibition Set For Pace Gallery LA

Pace Gallery has introduced David Lynch: LA, a serious exhibition of pictures opening September 19 in Los Angeles. Running via October 24, the present marks the primary presentation of Lynch’s paintings in his adopted hometown since his loss of life in 2025.

The exhibition brings collectively 5 distinct photographic sequence created between 1979 and 2008, putting them in dialogue to spotlight how Lynch used the lens as a bridge between his filmmaking and visible artwork practices. 

Renowned for his experimental model, he captured the surreal magnificence and darkish underbelly of American life in landmark movies like Blue Velvet (1986) and Inland Empire (2006), whereas portray a haunting portrait of Los Angeles within the masterpiece, Mulholland Drive (2001).

The presentation underscores Lynch’s formal artwork coaching, which started with 5 years of learning portray on the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts within the Sixties earlier than shifting to Los Angeles in 1972.

His foray into movie started in Philadelphia with a 1-minute experimental brief created for an artwork contest, which ultimately secured him an American Film Institute grant to make The Grandmother (1970). That success led him to the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, the place he started work on his debut function and indie cult traditional, Eraserhead (1977), the movie that launched his profession.

Yet at the same time as his movies introduced him worldwide acclaim, Lynch by no means deserted the studio. His work as a filmmaker and visible artist developed in parallel, every apply informing the opposite whereas remaining rooted in the identical deeply private imaginative and prescient.

Anchoring the show are 5 large-scale colour pictures from Figures and Smoke, which seize tightly cropped, ecstatic expressions of girls framed by drifting smoke, alongside architectural research of Los Angeles that spotlight its cinematic terrain, industrial edges, and ignored areas. The present additionally options black-and-white nudes that summary the feminine kind into landscape-like topographies, the Couch Series, which makes use of layered negatives to multiply and deform conventional art-historical figures, and Kits, a set of deadpan pictures documenting the step-by-step disassembly of a hen, duck, and fish. 

David Lynch: LA opens to the general public on September 19, 2026, at Pace Gallery, situated at 1201 South La Brea Avenue.