David Lynch
Pace Gallery, Berlin
January 29 - March 29, 2026
untitled (Berlin), 1999
© The David Lynch Estate, courtesy Pace Gallery
Tree at Night, 2019
© The David Lynch Estate, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace Gallery presents work by David Lynch at its gallery in Berlin. The exhibition highlights his vision across media, bringing together a select group of paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and early short films. It also includes a series of photographs taken in Berlin, touching on Lynch’s history with the German capital and Europe at large. The show precedes a major exhibition of Lynch’s work slated for fall 2026 at Pace’s gallery in the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles.
David Lynch, one of the foremost creative thinkers of our time, considered himself a visual artist first, studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, in the late 1960s. During this period, he conceived his first “moving painting,” Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), a multimedia work that fused painting and projection. This approach to image-making, rooted in material experimentation, remained central to his artistic practice.
A focused selection of his paintings, sculptures, watercolors, film, and photographs highlights the range of his practice and his sustained engagement with materiality. Lynch’s paintings, rife with unsettling and enigmatic images, draw on the visual language of Surrealism while also bringing together both text and storytelling. At their core is a pervasive unease that speaks to the subconscious realities of contemporary life. The watercolors—both monochrome and in the artist’s signature palette of reds, inky blues, and bursts of yellow— appear alongside paintings, each housed in frames designed by David Lynch himself. Three upright lamp sculptures made of steel, resin, plexiglass, plaster, and wood will punctuate the gallery with their uncanny illumination, each an artifact of the physical and atmospheric environments conjured by Lynch.
Photographs taken by David Lynch at abandoned industrial sites throughout Berlin in 1999 are also feature. The factory photographs, as this series is known, draw on his fascination with the aesthetic beauty and emotional aura of smokestacks, chimneys, broken windows, and heavy machinery. In the strange visual juxtapositions of this decaying urban landscape and others, David Lynch found beauty, channeling these moods into his artwork and seeking affinities wherever he traveled.
The exhibition history of Lynch’s artistic practice stretches back to 1967 and includes a solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1989, as well as numerous institutional shows across the globe. In 2007, the Fondation Cartier in Paris staged The Air Is on Fire, which later traveled to Milan, Moscow, and Copenhagen and was accompanied by a comprehensive exhibition catalog. The largest presentation of Lynch’s work to date, Someone Is in My House, was shown in 2018 at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, the Netherlands, and included over 500 artworks.
DAVID LYNCH
David Lynch’s prolific, nearly six-decade career spanned an extensive range of artmaking including painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, music, and film. David Lynch has been the subject of numerous retrospectives of his work, including The Air is on Fire: 40 years of Paintings, Photographs, Drawings, Experimental Films, and Sound Creations, Fondation Cartier, Paris (2007), which traveled to La Triennale di Milano (2008); Cultural Foundation Ekaterina, Moscow (2009); and GL Strand, Copenhagen (2011); Between Two Worlds, Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, Australia (2015); and Someone is in my House, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, the Netherlands (2018–19). His work is held in numerous public collections, including Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Würth Collection, Germany among others.
PACE BERLIN
Die Tankstelle, Bülowstraße 18, Berlin
