David Lynch has finally returned to PAFA—the place where he started his career. His love for art isn’t as well known as his career in filmmaking, but his masterpieces in this exhibition deserve to be celebrated.
For his exhibition, Lynch assembled around 90 works from 1965 to 2014. The result is perturbing and riveting. Many of his earlier works, made in Philadelphia during the 1960s, he credits to the influences of the City of Brotherly Love, which he found to be “dirty, insane and corrupt” (though he says that the city has drastically improved). But he still calls the Philadelphia of the 1960s his muse. He found the industrial wrecks and the urban deterioration to be a huge source of inspiration.
The way Lynch painted human bodies creates entrancing, often complex narratives. All of his depictions are scenes of childhood memories, nightmares, intense emotions and passions. Many of his paintings include childlike scribbles and chilling three–dimensional faces that pop out of the canvases. The pieces conjecture incredible stories. I found the manner in which he presents one of his first films, “Six Men Getting Sick” (1967), in relation to his drawings and paintings to really add to the context of his visual arts and film. Though this is his first major art exhibition in the US, he’s proven himself to be a master at more than film.
