David Lynch, Ladder Lamp (2022), all images via Pace
Renowned director and artist David Lynch has opened his first exhibition at Pace Gallery this month, titled Big Bongo Night. The show, featuring mixed media sculptures, paintings, and a work on paper that shed light on Lynch’s distinctive visual arts practice, mark a major step forward in the artist’s long-running art practice.
David Lynch, Big Bongo Night (Installation View)
David Lynch, Dream 9B: Where is the Alligator? (2022)
The show continues a body of work that continue the narrative arc of Lynch’s work, emphasizing disquieting scenes on wood panel and paper as well as sculptures with light components that emphasize the artist’s interest in space and light, color and tone as central conceits in the way that stories are constructed and understood in his work, and more broadly in visual media. Lynch’s artworks often meditate on moments of disruption in domestic, everyday settings. Rife with unsettling, threatening, and enigmatic images, the artist’s work draws from the visual languages of Surrealism and Art Brut, while bringing madcap forms and media into conversation. Lynch’s semi-abstract paintings, which often feature flattened compositions and perspectival distortions, explore enactments of bodily and industrial decay. At the core of these works is a pervasive unease that speaks to the dark realities of contemporary American life.
David Lynch, Head on Hill with Cloud and Airplane (2021)
Among the paintings included in Lynch’s forthcoming show with Pace is Airplane in Sky / Ant (2022), a fantastical tableau depicting a distressed ant at its center and incorporating playful textual elements. “It comes with the idea and it’s the idea that starts you, and then it’s this process of action and reaction,†Lynch has said of his approach to painting. “This is the thing you hope to keep alive. And there’s got to be a freedom to say, that didn’t work, it’s got to go. Then in the process of destruction, a beautiful new thing can emerge…random things, random choices and then—bang, an idea comes.â€
David Lynch, Big Bongo Night (Installation View)
A selection of Lynch’s mixed media lamp sculptures will also figure prominently in the exhibition. These works— 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 has long featured in both his films and in his works, with lighting elements and electrical charges used as graphical and narrative elements. Here, the artist turns both towards a central point, one that feels like a straightforward, yet increasingly subtle exploration of the themes and ideas of the artist’s body of work.
The show closes December 17th.
– D. Creahan
Read more:
David Lynch at Pace [Exhibition Site]
