An exhibition of 49 lithographs and three experimental short films by acclaimed American filmmaker David Lynch is open until September 21 at the Duchamp Gallery in Yvetot, Seine-Maritime, France. The show highlights Lynch’s lesser-known graphic work, created between 2007 and 2020, offering insight into the visual and thematic elements that permeate both his paintings and films.
Forty-nine lithographs and three experimental short films by David Lynch are on view until September 21 at the Duchamp Gallery in Yvetot, Seine-Maritime.
Displayed across two floors in a dreamlike atmosphere characteristic of the American filmmaker’s work, who passed away in January, “they reveal the spirit of David Lynch, a somewhat dark view of society and our contemporaries, but always tinged with a glimmer of hope,” explained Alexandre Mare, the exhibition curator, to AFP.
“Even in the darkness of his drawings, there is always a bit of light, of clear skies, allowing the horizon to open once again,” added Mare, who also serves as director of the Duchamp Gallery.
“It took some convincing to bring him here, to the countryside among the cows he loved deeply, far from the big capitals and major museums,” the curator recalled. “This place, its industrial past, and its fascination with the shadow theater of small provincial towns made him accept this somewhat crazy project.”
This exhibition does not focus on the “iconic filmmaker” but rather on his lesser-known graphic work: Lynch began his career at the Boston and Philadelphia Art Schools before turning to filmmaking, according to Mare.
His cinematic output was “not disconnected from his painting work, but indeed an integral part of it,” the curator stressed.
Two films from the 1960s help explain how David Lynch, still a painter at the time, “transitioned from painted canvas to projection screen to ultimately become the filmmaker we know.”
The lithographs, created between 2007 and 2020 in Paris, were selected “because they seemed closest to a screen: the format, the black-and-white contrasts, the presence of writing akin to subtitles in cinema.”
“We wanted to organize the exhibition as a succession of screens, a possible story of films David Lynch never made,” Mare explained.
Certain obsessions recur from Lynch’s films to his lithographs and drawings, he had a great passion for insects, ants, a fascination with fire, and haunting images of tortured bodies, noted the gallery director.
In this exhibition, as in David Lynch’s cinema, “everything is possible, everything is open to interpretation,” he concluded.
With AFP
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