As a child, Lynch drew and painted endlessly, declaring his intention to become a professional artist at the age of 14. He would go on to enrol in \u2013 and drop out of \u2013 two art schools before transferring to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia in 1966, where he thrived as a painting student. As well as taking influence from his instructors and peers, Lynch fell in love with the city \u2013 at that time a beacon of urban decay, filled with industrial ruins and weird visual juxtapositions.<\/p>\n
9David Lynch at Pace Gallery<\/a><\/p>\n During his studies, Lynch famously had a vision of the wind ruffling the grass of a static painting he\u2019d made, and was moved to create his first moving image: a one-minute film called Six Men Getting Sick, featuring six Baconesque heads spewing out liquid. \u201cI started out being a painter and the film came out of wanting to make a picture move,\u201d he said in a 2014 interview. \u201cSo I always say the same rules of painting apply to a lot of cinema, and you could say that films are moving paintings that tell a story with sound.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For Oliver Shultz, chief curator at Pace and one of the main instigators of the Berlin exhibition, a key aim of the show was to highlight the overlap not only between Lynch\u2019s paintings and films, but also the recurring ideas that spring up across his creative output at large, from his interest in form and colour to his endless quest into the subconscious. \u201cIt\u2019s thinking about how his vision is present in a way that is almost Spinozan,\u201d Shultz says.\u00a0<\/p>\n The works on display span paintings, sculptures, watercolours, film and photographs. \u201cIn the first room there are just two works: Lynch\u2019s first proper film, The Alphabet \u2013 which is a four-minute-long work made in 1968 that\u2019s essentially an alphabet lesson, but also a horror film \u2013 and a painting,\u201d says Shultz. In The Alphabet, Lynch establishes an \u201cidea of language as as a space of threat and menace\u201d, something he often did in his paintings too. \u201cIt was Linda who first told me about Paul and his intentions with Sarah and her sister,\u201d reads Lynch\u2019s handwritten scrawl, overlaying a painting of a man shooting mercilessly at a sheep as an aeroplane looms overhead. Here, as in so many Lynchian conjurings, individual parts become all the more strange and sinister when combined, giving way to \u201ca pervasive unease that speaks to the subconscious realities of contemporary life\u201d (to quote the exhibition text).<\/p>\n \u201cIn a formal sense, there\u2019s this surrealist way of using images \u2013 and words \u2013 that\u2019s ultimately rooted in Lynch\u2019s work as a painter,\u201d Shultz expands. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t think you\u2019d know that if you just watch the films, but when you see the paintings, you understand that connection. So, in the first room, we wanted to set up this conversation between the moving image and the painterly aesthetic and methodology.\u201d<\/p>\n Thereafter, works in the main gallery space explore the range of Lynch\u2019s practice and his sustained engagement with materiality. \u201cOur Berlin gallery was once a gas station that was then converted into a house, and it has a kind of domestic feeling,\u201d explains the curator. The artworks on the ground floor are lit by Lynch\u2019s lamp sculptures, which appear to increase the darkness rather than decrease it, Shultz says, to typically atmospheric effect. \u201cI also carpeted the space with this carpet that feels like it comes from Rabbits [Lynch\u2019s 2022 short, set in a living room],\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n In a wonderfully Lynchian instance of life and time folding in on themselves, hanging alongside paintings and drawings is a series of rarely seen photographs of abandoned industrial sites in Berlin, taken by Lynch in 1999, which hark back to his fascination with the grit, grime and patina of 60s Philadelphia. \u201cThe 90s was a period in which Berlin was defined by voids, created by the wall and not yet filled. So there\u2019s this city of voids and this aesthetic of voids \u2013 think how many holes and gaps and fissures and anxieties of porousness there are in Lynch\u2019s work,\u201d says Shultz.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/a>
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David Lynch, It was Linda who…, 2021\u00a9 The David Lynch Estate, courtesy of Pace Gallery<\/p>\n
![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/02\/468277.jpeg\")
David Lynch, Untitled (Berlin 5354: 29), 1999\u00a9 The David Lynch Estate, courtesy of Pace Gallery<\/p>\n