David Lynch studied painting at the Boston Museum School and Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA).

Lynch’s five-decade career included an extensive body of painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, installation, music, and film. While studying at PAFA in the late 1960s, Lynch had a vision to make his first ‘moving painting’; a sculptural painting beneath a moving projection titled Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), 1967. This multimedia work marked Lynch’s first foray into video and filmmaking. From then on, his prolific body of work touched on subjects of the organic body and industrial sites in various states of decay; describing a deeper human experience both beyond and within the everyday. Often depicting these scenes with a language of surrealism and mystery, Lynch’s work straddled the porous divide between the body and the world it inhabits.

Lynch was the subject of numerous solo museum exhibitions internationally, including, a survey of his photography at the IPFO House of Photography, Olten, Switzerland (2021), which traveled to the Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen (2021-22). In 2019, HOME, Manchester, hosted the first major survey of his work in the United Kingdom. Retrospectives include “Someone is in my House” at the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht (2018-19), “Silence and Dynamism” at the Centre of Contemporary Art, Torun, Poland (2017-18), “Between Two Worlds” at the Queensland Art Gallery in Brisbane, Australia (2015), and “The Air is on Fire” at the Fondation Cartier, Paris (2007). In 2014-15, a survey was presented at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) where he studied. In 2013-14, Brett Littman curated a thematic selection of works utlizing “naming” through narrative text at Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles, which traveled to the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (2014-15). Other earlier important solos included “David Lynch: The Factory Photographs” at the Photographers’ Gallery, London (2014), the GL Strand in Copenhagen (2010-11), and the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow (2009).

Born in Missoula, Montana, David Lynch lived and worked in Los Angeles. Lynch was also known as a filmmaker and recording artist who over the past three decades wrote and directed critically acclaimed films such as Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive, Inland Empire and the television series Twin Peaks.