David Lynch

Before moving to Los Angeles, Lynch spent five years studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, a city that, in the 1960s, was marked by industrial decline and an atmosphere of unease. Those formative experiences became the foundation of his visual language, shaping the sense of mystery, tension, and psychological intensity that would define his work for decades. Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1972 as a fellow at the American Film Institute and was given the stables at the historic Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, where he lived and worked for the next five years. It was there that he made Eraserhead (1977), launching his career as a filmmaker. 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: LA brings together photographs from five series Lynch created between 1979 to 2008. Central to his artistic vision was an emphasis on atmosphere and storytelling, which is pervasive in each of the bodies of works. Five large-scale color photographs from the series Figures and Smoke anchor the exhibition. In these works, women’s faces are pictured tightly cropped, captured in moments of ecstasy. Smoke drifts from their red-stained mouths like clouds in the sky—ephemeral yet vivid in our imagination. In his “portraits” of Los Angeles, also on view in the presentation, Lynch photographed the specific architecture of the city with his distinctive directorial eye, capturing its cinematic terrain, industrial edges, and overlooked urban areas. Also included is a prominent body of Lynch’s photographic work exploring the nude. These black-and-white works abstract the female body into framed, topographical forms, dissolving figure into landscape. In his Couch Series, Lynch invokes the odalisque, the reclining figure of art historical tradition. Here though, the figure is multiplied, blurred, and ultimately distorted in a reference to his interest in early photography (of layering negatives to create multiple images) and, simultaneously, a reinterpretation of the art historical representations of this enduring subject. With his series of photographs titled Kits, Lynch drew on an obsession with everyday minutia and an understanding of how things work. Recalling his childhood making model airplanes, he documented the process of disassembling a fish, chicken, and duck with wry instructions on how to put them back together. Inimitably “Lynchian,” these photographs reveal the artist’s singular ability to transform the familiar into the uncanny blurring the boundaries between reality and imagination.