On a warm September evening along South La Brea Avenue, the sidewalk outside Pace Gallery belonged to a singular California gathering. Film students in oversized thrift coats mingled with blue-chip collectors, goths in black velvet, and Hollywood directors. They had all converged for David Lynch: L.A., the first hometown exhibition dedicated exclusively to the artist’s camera work since his death in 2025.
For more than fifty years, Los Angeles served as Lynch’s primary creative engine. Moving west in 1972 on an American Film Institute fellowship after five gritty years studying painting in Philadelphia, he arrived in darkness and woke up to the smell of blooming night jasmine. The institute granted him living quarters in the stables of Beverly Hills’ Greystone Mansion, where he spent five years building sets and shooting Eraserhead.
The city took hold of his imagination immediately. Yet while the wider public celebrated him as a cinematic auteur, Lynch considered himself a visual artist who happened to direct movies. He worked across sound design, printmaking, painting, and still photography without making commercial distinctions between them.
Five Groundbreaking Series Under the Gallery Lights
The Pace exhibition brings together 35 photographs produced between 1979 and 2008, grouped across five distinct bodies of work. Each series demonstrates a startling command of chiaroscuro lighting, tactile textures, and psychological suspense.
Five large-scale color photographs from his Figures and Smoke series anchor the gallery’s main hall. Lynch framed women in tight closeups with vivid red lipstick, capturing expressions suspended between ecstasy and dread. White smoke billows outward from their parted lips like cumulus clouds, yet no cigarette or match appears in any frame. As reporter Dave Schilling observed in The Guardian, the vapor hangs in the air less like tobacco and more like an escaping soul.
Adjacent walls display his architectural portraits of Los Angeles. Lynch turned his lens toward cracked asphalt alleys, corrugated industrial fences, empty spillways, and weathered stucco facades under blinding midday sun. These are not nostalgic Hollywood postcards. They capture a working city of heat, diesel exhaust, and quiet industrial monuments.
In his Nudes series, black-and-white exposures reduce human anatomy to shadowy landscapes of bone and skin. His Couch Series twists the classical art historical motif of the reclining odalisque. Layering multiple exposures directly on film negatives, Lynch blurred limbs into ghostly motion, placing hands where feet should rest.
The most unsettling works belong to the Kits series. Drawing on his childhood memories of building plastic model airplanes, Lynch photographed the methodical dissection of chickens, ducks, and fish. Each organ, bone, and smear of dark liquid is catalogued on white paper alongside wry, printed reassembly instructions.
The Daily Studio Ritual Behind the Camera
The sheer breadth of the imagery points to Lynch’s relentless work routine. "He made something every single day of his life," his son Riley Lynch shared during the opening. "We would go out in the car, explore, take pictures, and collect information. It was a cycle of inspiration."
Lynch called this practice "the art life." His schedule was uncompromising: waking at dawn, drinking black coffee, and heading directly into his Hollywood Hills studio workshop. He drafted furniture concepts on yellow legal pads and collaborated with the same local metal fabricator for decades.
That physical discipline extended beyond two dimensions. Pace installed one of Lynch’s rare handmade floor lamps alongside the photo series: a welded iron base supporting an organic lump of red plaster, fitted with an industrial toggle switch. "Each one is violently itself, but it is so beautiful," noted Pace managing partner Bill Griffin. "There is a spirituality to it."
Viewing this photography today confirms how deeply Lynch shaped the visual grammar of contemporary art. He refused digital trickery, preferring mechanical cameras, optical manipulation, and practical staging to summon unease.
A Stepping Stone to LACMA
The presentation at Pace serves as an opening preview for a much larger civic recognition. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is currently organizing a comprehensive David Lynch retrospective scheduled to premiere in 2028 before traveling internationally.
For Lynch, beauty was never found in pristine perfection. He sought out rust, electrical hums, water stains, and the organic dignity of decay. He proved that an empty alleyway and a billow of smoke held all the raw material needed to unlock the subconscious.
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