Pace Presents ‘David Lynch: LA,’ the First Show of His Photography in His Home City Since His 2025 Passing
The exhibition gathers five of the late director’s photographic series in dialogue for the first time.
Summary
Pace will stage David Lynch: LA at its Los Angeles gallery, marking the first presentation of his work in the city since his death in 2025
The show brings together five photographic series Lynch created between 1979 and 2008, spanning Figures and Smoke, his LA portraits, the nude works, the Couch Series and Kits
The exhibition frames Lynch's photography within the myth and atmosphere of the city he called home for more than fifty years
Pace Gallery Los Angeles has announced David Lynch: LA, a photography exhibition running September 19 through October 24. The show is the first presentation of Lynch’s work in his home city since his passing in 2025, and the first time five of his photographic series will be placed in dialogue together, spotlighting a practice that sat between his contributions to painting and film.
The city itself is the connective tissue. Lynch called Los Angeles home for more than five decades, arriving in 1972 and building the locus of his most creative work there. The exhibition positions his photo-based images inside the myth and emotional landscape of the city, holding close to its archetypes and treating its defining qualities as atmospheric, psychological and felt rather than strictly physical.
That sensibility traces back well before his arrival in California. Lynch spent five years studying painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, a city whose 1960s industrial decline and uneasy mood seeded the mystery, tension and psychological intensity that would run through his work for decades. He came to Los Angeles in 1972 as a fellow at the American Film Institute and was given the stables at the historic Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, where he lived and worked for the next five years and made Eraserhead (1977). Even as filmmaking brought international acclaim, he never abandoned the studio, developing his work as a director and visual artist in parallel, each practice feeding the other.
The presentation draws its depth from that dual vision, gathering photographs made between 1979 and 2008 across five bodies of work. Five large-scale color photographs from Figures and Smoke anchor the show, picturing tightly cropped faces in moments of ecstasy as smoke drifts from red-stained mouths. Lynch’s “portraits” of Los Angeles turn his directorial eye on the city’s cinematic terrain, industrial edges and overlooked corners, while a prominent group of black-and-white nudes abstracts the female body into topographical forms that dissolve figure into landscape. In the Couch Series, he reworks the odalisque of art history, multiplying and blurring the reclining figure in a nod to early photographic layering. Kits rounds out the selection, documenting the disassembly of a fish, chicken and duck with wry reassembly instructions rooted in his childhood habit of building model airplanes, a body of work that captures his knack for turning the familiar uncanny.
The show also lands at a moment of wider institutional attention. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is in the early stages of preparing a Lynch retrospective, in discussion with other museums, per Pace’s announcement, though those plans remain preliminary.
David Lynch: LA opens September 19 and runs through October 24 at Pace’s Los Angeles gallery.
Pace Los Angeles
1201 South La Brea Avenue
Los Angeles
