David Lynch was not only an Oscar-nominated filmmaker but also a painter, actor, photographer and musician. He cultivated a Surrealist style in his visual mediums. He is best known for his films, including Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Several of his films received Oscar nominations but were never winners. He initially trained in painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His work was heavily influenced by the Anglo/Irish artist Francis Bacon.
Born in 1946, Lynch began making short films in the late 1960s. He moved to Los Angeles in 1971 and studied film-making at the AFI Conservatory, where he began filming his first feature, Eraserhead. It was completed in 1976 and received with puzzlement. It was also rejected by most film festivals. However, in the late 70s, it became a success on the late-night “midnight movie” circuit. Both Mel Brooks and Stanley Kubrick loved the film.
Success followed with The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. In 2019, he was given an honorary lifetime achievement Oscar; in 1990, he also won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for Wild at Heart.
Lynch and Mark Frost created the ABC series Twin Peaks (1990–91). Lynch was nominated for two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Directing for a Drama Series and Outstanding Writing for a Drama Series. Lynch co-wrote and directed its film prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and the limited series Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). He has also worked as an actor, including his portrayals of FBI agent Gordon Cole in Twin Peaks and director John Ford in Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, as well as guest roles in TV series such as The Cleveland Show (2010–13), Louie (2012), and Robot Chicken (2020, 2022). Lynch publicly stated that it was uncertain if he would return to making films after he completed Twin Peaks: The Return and concentrated his creative efforts on painting and music in his final years.
Lynch also practised transcendental meditation, creating the David Lynch Foundation for Consciousness-Based Education and World Peace in 2005;
“It is with deep regret that we, his family, announce the passing of the man and the artist, David Lynch,” read a Facebook post. “We would appreciate some privacy at this time. There’s a big hole in the world now that he’s no longer with us. But, as he would say, “Keep your eye on the doughnut and not on the hole.” It’s a beautiful day with golden sunshine and blue skies.”
Pace, his gallery, announced the passing of a renowned artist and filmmaker with this statement, “Over more than 50 years, Lynch nurtured a multidisciplinary practice stemming from his early work as a painter that spanned many other mediums, including drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, music, and film.
Though he was an artist first and foremost, Lynch was widely known as the maker of avant-garde and intensely inventive films such as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), as well as the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). He received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director and one for Best Adapted Screenplay, and in 2020, he was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.
In his art, Lynch often meditated on moments of disruption in domestic, everyday settings. Rife with unsettling, threatening, and enigmatic images, his work draws from the visual languages of Surrealism and Art Brut. Bringing madcap forms and media into the conversation, Lynch’s semi-abstract paintings—which often feature flattened compositions and perspectival distortions—explore enactments of bodily and industrial decay. A pervasive unease at the core of his work speaks to the dark realities of contemporary American life.
“Anybody lucky enough to grow up during the prime Lynch years—the 80s and 90s—had the architecture of their brain significantly rebuilt by his genius. What an unbelievable loss of a pure creator. Lynch turned insanity into philosophy.” – Marc Glimcher.
Lynch presented his first solo exhibition with Pace, which began representing him in 2022 in New York that same year. Titled Big Bongo Night, the show featured sculptures, paintings, and a work on paper that shed light on Lynch’s storytelling abilities. The mixed media lamp sculptures that figured prominently in the presentation—forged with various combinations of steel, wood, resin, plexiglass, and plaster—are derived from the artist’s early paintings and experimentations with projection and moving images. Depending on their material makeups, these structures range from linear to geometric to biomorphic.
“Electricity is so thrilling, and think about wood…Nature supplies this for us, all different kinds of wood, and the structure of it can be sawed, sanded, shaped, polished, turned into furniture, so many things like houses,” Lynch once said of his fascination with the sculptures’ materiality.
Born in Missoula, Montan, in 1946, Lynch made his first foray into filmmaking while studying at the Boston Museum School and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the mid-1960s. Desiring to animate his two-dimensional works, he produced his first “moving painting,” Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), which features a moving projection atop a multi-dimensional painting.
Throughout his career, Lynch was the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier in Paris; the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, Netherlands; Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia; Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow; HOME Manchester in the United Kingdom; Sperone Westwater in New York; Castelli Gallery in New York; Jack Tilton Gallery in New York; James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles; William Griffin Gallery in Los Angeles; Kayne Griffin in Los Angeles; and elsewhere. His art can be found in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, and other collections worldwide.”
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