David Lynch: Last Show in Berlin
Before a major retrospective planned for autumn 2026 in Los Angeles, Berlin offers a final encounter with the visual art of David Lynch, who passed away in January 2025.
By Guénola Pellen. Art by David Lynch.
Along the walls of Pace Gallery’s Berlin outpost, a series of photographs taken in the city in 1999 anchors the exhibition in its intimate geography. Wastelands. Gnawed façades. Textures no one looks at. These places resemble the ones his films would later attempt to inhabit: sites where what gets abandoned refuses to vanish entirely.
David Lynch painted before he filmed. The way one gasps for air, out of urgency, out of sheer inability to do otherwise. Berlin, a city that knows darkness and what gets built on top of it, still devotes its walls to him for a few more days. Before Eraserhead and the red curtains of Twin Peaks, he roamed from art school to art school — Corcoran, Boston, Philadelphia — not chasing a degree, but hunting for a language. He forged it with paint, wood, his hands. Hollywood would come later.
His films would draw their substance from these never-before-shown watercolours. From these paintings of tangled materials — oil, glue, resin, whatever clutters a studio when one refuses to rank noble materials above the rest. As it happens, Lynch built his frames himself. Not out of whimsy. Out of absolute demand: he delegated nothing, not the frame, not the nails.
Three of his lamp-sculptures command the space. Steel, resin, plexiglass, plaster. Already present during his Pace debut in 2022, they only half illuminate. They do what Lynch always did: carve pockets of shadow rather than simply bring light. Step closer, and the light retreats.
In an adjoining room, early short films loop endlessly opposite the canvases. One perceives the same thing on both sides of the partition. What painting held back, locked in the thickness of matter, film set free. But the source remains on the canvas. Painting never served as a detour toward photography and cinema. It sheltered the starting point of his psyche, and perhaps the destination.
“David Lynch” is on show at Pace Gallery Berlin through 22 March 2026.
