David Lynch: The Unified Field

Exhibition Info
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Curated by
Robert Cozzolino, Senior Curator and Curator of Modern Art
David Lynch's first major museum exhibition in the United States, organized in close collaboration with the artist

View an exhibition walk-through with David Lynch HERE.

In 1967 as an advanced painting student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in Philadelphia, David Lynch made a hybrid work of art that brought together painting, sculpture, sound, film, and installation. Six Men Getting Sick (1967) expanded Lynch’s practice and opened him up to the possibilities of filmmaking. He went on to become internationally renowned as a film director but never stopped working as a visual artist. Lynch has maintained a devoted studio practice, developing a parallel body of painting, prints, photography, and drawing that deserves to be better known. In many ways his identity as an American artist brings together all aspects of his creative life into a unified field of subjects and concerns.

David Lynch: The Unified Field was Lynch’s first major museum exhibition in the United States, organized in close collaboration with the artist. It brought together approximately 90 paintings and drawings from 1965 to present. Part of the exhibition explored Lynch’s early work, much of which has never been displayed in public. Six Men Getting Sick was restaged for the first time and presented with related drawings. Several early short films, made in Philadelphia, were also on display.

Recurrent themes in the exhibition included the human body combined with “organic phenomena” in unlikely combinations and the home depicted as a site for childhood memories, flashbacks, nightmares, or passion. Lynch’s ability to suggest the emotional intensity of his subject matter through paint textures, surface effects, and physical traces of his hand, brings intimacy and empathy to even the most disturbing narratives. Many works included presented a tense, mysterious scenario suspended in the course of a story. We witness psychologically-charged moments isolated out of context.

The exhibition was complimented by "Something Clicked in Philly": David Lynch and His Contemporaries.

Learn more about the Painting department at PAFA, where David Lynch was trained as a visual artist.

David Lynch is represented by Kayne Griffin Corcoran Gallery in Los Angeles.

 

News and Press

New Yorker | The Top Thirty Cultural Moments of the Twenty-Tens

The New Yorker's Troy Patterson selects PAFA's 2014 exhibition of David Lynch's work, The Unified Field, as one of his top cultural moments of the decade:

I see that a certain sort of film critic, possibly possessive, possibly possessed by a bias against the tube, insists upon claiming the third season of “Twin Peaks” for the cinema, despite its clear design as home entertainment for haunting your house. In reply, I offer this museum exhibition, which gathered about ninety paintings and drawings, made over five decades, as evidence that Lynch is too large an artist to bother with such

Vogue | The Expanded Consciousness of David Lynch’s Squeaky Flies in the Mud

"David Lynch, the artist and master director behind such macabre, Surrealist films as Mulholland Drive, The Elephant Man, and Blue Velvet—not to mention the cult favorite television series Twin Peaks—has made a career out of leaning into the world’s discomfort, or at least of exposing it."

David Lynch spent the late 1960s in Philadelphia, where he studied painting at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

PAFA Presents Exhibition Programs in Conjunction with David Lynch: The Unified Field

The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) presents an exciting array of exhibition-related programs in celebration of David Lynch: The Unified Field, the first major U.S. museum exhibition of international filmmaker, artist and PAFA alumnus David Lynch, on view September 13, 2014 – January 11, 2015.

PAFA Presents David Lynch: The Unified Field

PAFA presents David Lynch: The Unified Field, on view September 13, 2014 through January 11, 2015. The Unified Field will be the first major U.S. museum exhibition of internationally-renowned filmmaker and PAFA alumnus David Lynch (b. 1946), featuring works from all periods of Lynch’s career