David Lynch’s photographs and sculptures are darkly alluring in Berlin

Although best known as a filmmaker, David Lynch (1946-2025) considered himself first and foremost a visual artist. In the late 1960s, he studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, where he created his first ‘moving painting’, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times). Merging mediums and materials, it offered an early hint of the experimentation that was to define his career.

Throughout his life, Lynch went on to create sculptures, watercolours, film, photographs and paintings, many of which are to be united in an exhibition at Pace Gallery, Berlin. Opening on 29 January 2026, it is a teaser for a major retrospective set to open at Pace, Los Angeles this autumn. The exhibition follows rare but significant showings of Lynch’s art, including 2007’s ‘The Air Is on Fire’ at Fondation Cartier in Paris and 2018’s ‘Someone Is in My House’ at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, featuring more than 500 works.

Works here include the ‘factory’ series of photographs that Lynch took at deserted industrial sites in Berlin in 1999, which captured an evocative and empty world of broken windows, chimneys and machinery. Their beauty sits alongside his unsettling paintings, which intertwine surrealist themes with text and open-ended images. His watercolours, in his distinctive muted palette splashed with reds and yellows, are presented in the frames Lynch designed himself.

Elsewhere, upright lamp sculptures built from steel, resin, Plexiglas, plaster, and wood add to the atmosphere of finding beauty in the unexpected, much like Lynch himself.

Pace Gallery in Berlin presents work by David Lynch from 29 January to 22 March 2026, pacegallery.com