Pace Gallery has announced David Lynch: LA, a major exhibition of photographs opening September 18, in Los Angeles. Running through October 24, the show marks the first presentation of Lynch’s artwork in his adopted hometown since his death in 2025.
The exhibition brings together five distinct photographic series created between 1979 and 2008, placing them in dialogue to highlight how Lynch used the lens as a bridge between his filmmaking and visual art practices.
Renowned for his experimental style, he captured the surreal beauty and dark underbelly of American life in landmark films like Blue Velvet (1986) and Inland Empire (2006), while painting a haunting portrait of Los Angeles in the masterpiece, Mulholland Drive (2001).
David Lynch, untitled (Black and White Nude)
The David Lynch Estate
The presentation underscores Lynch’s formal art training, which began with five years of studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the 1960s before moving to Los Angeles in 1972.
His foray into film began in Philadelphia with a 1-minute experimental short created for an art contest, which eventually secured him an American Film Institute grant to make The Grandmother (1970). That success led him to the AFI Conservatory in Los Angeles, where he began work on his debut feature and indie cult classic, Eraserhead (1977), the film that launched his career.
Yet even as his films brought him international acclaim, Lynch never abandoned the studio. His work as a filmmaker and visual artist developed in parallel, each practice informing the other while remaining rooted in the same deeply personal vision.
David Lynch, Couch Series #13, 2008
The David Lynch Estate
Anchoring the display are five large-scale color photographs from Figures and Smoke, which capture tightly cropped, ecstatic expressions of women framed by drifting smoke, alongside architectural studies of Los Angeles that highlight its cinematic terrain, industrial edges, and overlooked spaces. The show also features black-and-white nudes that abstract the female form into landscape-like topographies, the Couch Series, which uses layered negatives to multiply and distort traditional art-historical figures, and Kits, a collection of deadpan photographs documenting the step-by-step disassembly of a chicken, duck, and fish.
David Lynch: LA opens to the public on Friday, September 18, 2026, at Pace Gallery, located at 1201 South La Brea Avenue, with an opening reception on Saturday, September 19.