From January 29 to March 29, 2026, a new exhibition presented by Pace Gallery in Berlin.
David Lynch is far more than the creator of unsettling cinematic worlds and fractured narratives. Long before becoming a filmmaker, he identified himself first and foremost as a visual artist. This lesser-known but deeply rooted dimension of his practice is at the heart of the new exhibition presented by Pace Gallery in Berlin, on view from January 29 to March 29, 2026. The show brings together a carefully curated selection of painting, sculpture, watercolor, photography, and experimental film, spanning more than five decades of artistic research.
David Lynch
Trained as a painter at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 1960s, Lynch produced his first hybrid work there: Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), a pioneering experiment combining painted imagery with projection — a kind of “moving painting.” From that moment on, cinema never replaced his visual practice but instead became one of its many extensions. The Berlin exhibition emphasizes precisely this continuity: Lynch is not a filmmaker who later turned to the visual arts, but an artist who moves fluidly across media to construct a unified imaginative universe.
The paintings on display are populated by disturbing figures, distorted bodies, and ambiguous interiors. While echoes of Surrealism are evident, they are stripped of dreamlike softness and replaced by a dense, almost claustrophobic tension. Painting becomes an emotional field, where color operates as psychological matter. The watercolors — often monochrome or dominated by deep reds, nocturnal blues, and sudden flashes of yellow — intensify this introspective atmosphere. Presented in frames designed by Lynch himself, they suggest that even the exhibition apparatus is part of the artwork, reinforcing the idea of a total visual experience.
David Lynch, Untitled, 2020, mixed media painting on wood
© David Lynch. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer, Los Angeles
Breaking the two-dimensional rhythm of the works on paper and canvas are three vertical lamp sculptures made of steel, resin, plexiglass, plaster, and wood. Hovering between design object and theatrical device, they introduce a strong physical presence into the gallery space. The light they emit feels artificial and unsettling, recalling the suspended interiors and charged environments that populate Lynch’s films. Here sculpture functions as an emotional machine — a three-dimensional extension of his visual language.
David Lynch, White Table Top Lamp, 2022 © David Lynch
A key section of the exhibition is devoted to the Factory Photographs, a series of images Lynch took in Berlin in 1999. Chimneys, abandoned factories, broken windows, and obsolete machinery become the subjects of a photographic investigation that goes far beyond urban documentation. What draws Lynch in is the emotional aura of these places, their degraded beauty, their ability to condense memory and unease. These industrial ruins are transformed into inner landscapes, psychic surfaces projected onto the city.
It is no coincidence that Berlin reappears as a backdrop. Marked by deep historical layers and suspended between industrial legacy and cultural reinvention, the city has long represented an affinity for Lynch — a territory where residue and transformation coexist naturally. Viewed today, these photographs also read as an emotional map of post-industrial Europe, filtered through the gaze of an artist fascinated by the architectures of the subconscious.
Lynch’s career as a visual artist is extensive and well established: from his solo show at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1989 to the major retrospective The Air Is on Fire at Fondation Cartier in 2007, which later traveled to Milan, Moscow, and Copenhagen; and from there to Someone Is in My House at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht in 2018, the most comprehensive presentation of his work to date, featuring over 500 pieces. The Pace Berlin exhibition enters this lineage with a more intimate scale, offering a less monumental and more material-focused portrait of Lynch — one centered on process, texture, and the fragility of making.
David Lynch
Within this exhibition, painting, photography, sculpture, and moving image exist without hierarchy, forming a cohesive portrait of an artist who has always approached art as a space of inner exploration. Rather than celebrating the myth of the filmmaker, the Berlin show foregrounds Lynch’s quiet labor as a visual artist: a continuous investigation into the shadow zones of perception, where each work becomes a threshold between what is seen and what remains hidden.
