An icon among American filmmakers, David Lynch is equally committed as a visual artist. He began his career as a painter and started making short films while a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts to find a way to make his paintings move.
Lynch works across many different media to create paintings, sculpture, works on paper and photographs. Recent paintings combine primitively drawn figures and text with thick textured areas of paint and, often, inserted lit colored light bulbs. Framed in thick gold frames under glass (inspired by Francis Bacon’s frames), they become box-like, objects in their own right. Narrative subjects exhibit Lynch’s trademark whimsy, wit and humor along with his recognizable penchant for the ambiguous, yet precisely depicted, frozen moment that unveils an instinctual, often violent or tragic human emotion, almost verging on the absurd.
Lynch’s abstract sculpture, also incorporating lit light bulbs, is simultaneously anthropomorphic, surreal and humorous. Lynch frequently refers to Magritte as one of his favorite artists.
New York City, NY; NYC