NEW YORK, NY.- Pace announced the passing of renowned artist and filmmaker David Lynch at age 78. Over the course of more than 50 years, Lynch nurtured a multidisciplinary practice stemming from his early work as a painter that spanned many other mediums, including drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, music, and film.

Though he was an artist first and foremost, Lynch was widely known as the maker of avant-garde and intensely inventive films such as Eraserhead (1977), The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet (1986), Lost Highway (1997), Mulholland Drive (2001), and Inland Empire (2006), as well as the television series Twin Peaks (1990-91) and Twin Peaks: The Return (2017). He received three Academy Award nominations for Best Director and one for Best Adapted Screenplay, and in 2020 he was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement.

In his art, Lynch often meditated on moments of disruption in domestic, everyday settings. Rife with unsettling, threatening, and enigmatic images, his work draws from the visual languages of Surrealism and Art Brut. 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 his work is a pervasive unease that speaks to the dark realities of contemporary American life.

“Anybody lucky enough to grow up during the prime Lynch years—the 80s and 90s—had the architecture of their brain significantly rebuilt by his genius. What an unbelievable loss of a pure creator. Lynch turned insanity into philosophy.” – Marc Glimcher

Lynch presented his first solo exhibition with Pace, which began representing him in 2022, in New York that same year. Titled Big Bongo Night, the show featured sculptures, paintings, and a work on paper that shed light on Lynch’s storytelling abilities. The mixed media lamp sculptures that figured prominently in the presentation—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 is so thrilling and think about wood...Nature supplies this for us, all different kinds of wood, and the structure of it can be sawed, sanded, shaped, polished, turned into furniture, so many things like houses,” Lynch once said of his fascination with the sculptures’ materiality.

Born in Missoula, Montana in 1946, Lynch made his first foray into filmmaking when he was studying at the Boston Museum School and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the mid-1960s. Desiring to animate his two-dimensional works, he produced his first “moving painting,” Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times) (1967), which features a moving projection atop a multidimensional painting.

Throughout his career, Lynch was the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier in Paris; the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, Netherlands; Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia; Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow; HOME Manchester in the United Kingdom; Sperone Westwater in New York; Castelli Gallery in New York; Jack Tilton Gallery in New York; James Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles; William Griffin Gallery in Los Angeles; Kayne Griffin in Los Angeles; and elsewhere. His art can be found in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht; the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris; and other collections around the world.