The David Lynch exhibition at Pace Gallery. Photograph: Courtesy of Pace Gallery View image in fullscreen The David Lynch exhibition at Pace Gallery. Photograph: Courtesy of Pace Gallery David Lynch ‘He made something every single day’: David Lynch’s inscrutable photography celebrated in LA show The director’s surrealist films defined Los Angeles. Now the city is celebrating his other passion: photography
Dave Schilling in Los Angeles Wed 23 Sep 2026 15.00 CEST Last modified on Wed 23 Sep 2026 20.08 CEST Share Prefer the Guardian on Google No one can bring Los Angeles together like David Lynch .
The first posthumous exhibition of the director and artist’s photographs went on display at LA’s Pace Gallery this weekend, drawing a massive crowd of goths, weirdos and art world observers to celebrate a creative mind that has few equals in American pop culture history.
Lynch’s disappearance from this mortal plane last year has not dimmed the public’s appreciation for his surrealist, idiosyncratic perspective on American life. The exhibition – featuring photos that are erotic, disturbing and sometimes comically violent – encapsulates all the things that made Lynch one of the city’s foremost creative minds.
Photos of mysterious women blowing smoke, multiple exposures of a nude subject on a chaise longue, dissected animals; the work is “radical”, said Bill Griffin, managing partner for Pace Gallery. “It dealt with the human condition in a very large way. It dealt with consciousness and unconsciousness.” Pace represented Lynch for years, and is spearheading the efforts to maintain and catalogue his fine art work with the David Lynch Foundation.
View image in fullscreen David Lynch, Untitled (Nudes and Smoke), c 1994. Photograph: The David Lynch Estate To be around Lynch’s art is to be fully conscious. It requires thought, and introspection. There are never easy answers with anything he created. Aficionados of his films still debate what Blue Velvet or Mulholland Drive were actually about. The decay of American society? Sure. The fallibility of memory? Certainly. Sexual repression? Probably. It’s all in there for you to discover, and that’s what makes Lynch’s art so vital.
Lynch’s son Riley is taking the lead on preserving the artist’s body of work. Discovery was a huge part of his childhood, Riley said. He remembers driving around LA with his dad, taking photos of whatever it was that moved him and his siblings. “We’re gonna go out in the car, and we’re just gonna go explore and take pictures and to collect information,” Riley said. “It was just like a cycle of inspiration.”
Read more It’s easy to be inspired by Lynch’s photos. The pictures of women in extreme closeup, sporting red lipstick, evoke feelings of mystery and dread. Who is she? What is the smoke emanating from her mouth? There’s no cigarette in the frame. Is it her soul? A spirit departing her corporeal body? The woman on the couch, in the multiple exposures, seems to be coming apart. Hands where feet should be. A body without clarity or logic.
Lynch was always a keen observer of the feminine. Laura Palmer, the tragic hero of Twin Peaks, is perhaps his greatest fictional creation. She’s abused and murdered by her father, kicking off the twisty detective story of that franchise, but she retains her dignity even in death. Everyone in the town of Twin Peaks felt as if they knew Laura, but through the course of the series and its feature film prequel, the residents realize they did…