On David Lynch’s Visual Art in “The Unified Field” for Artforum
posted on January 17, 2025
In the summer of 2014, the editors of Artforum asked me to write a preview of a show called “The Unified Field” featuring the visual artwork of David Lynch. I was grateful to re-read that short piece today and share it below.
Some of the pieces in the show may have been art school fodder, but the exhibition was much more than that — it was a homecoming. David Lynch’s art and films are deeply rooted in his connection to Philadelphia — a city that shaped his imagination, haunted his dreams, and provided the raw materials for a lifetime of creative exploration.
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“David Lynch: The Unified Field”
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA)- September 13, 2014 – January 11, 2015 – Curated by Robert Cozzolino
“In the end we all return to our beginnings,” so says Susan Sontag in her story “American Spirits” (1978). It’s an apt concept for tracing David Lynch’s roots through paintings, photographs, drawings, and their imbrication with filmmaking. As a PAFA art student, Lynch created the one-minute film “Six Men Getting Sick,” a multimedia installation, presciently contemporary in its melding of painting, sculpture, animation, and sound. The world recognizes Lynch as an American auteur, but curator Cozzolino’s approach underscores a life-long art practice. This ambitious exhibition, Lynch’s first major museum show, includes 90+ paintings and drawings from 1965 to present and previously private examples of early work. “Six Men Getting Sick” is contextualized with ephemera and will be restaged for the first time since 1967. Several more shorts are highlights: the films are Philadelphia-set, signifying Lynchian self-proclaimed rootedness, “The biggest inspiration of my life was the city of Philadelphia. For sure.”
Themes reappear: arch evocations of the mysterious in the familiar; the body in unlikely configuration with “organic phenomena”; and “the home” site of flashback, nightmare, and as psychologically-charged trigger. Lynch’s proficiency portraying intensity through texture, composition, and framing, intimate what otherwise is commonly, and blandly, disturbing. And there are the mysterious crenellations of PAFA itself: the original building is a remarkable structure by the master of Victorian Gothic Mannerism Frank Furness. Lynch is presented as an artist not only a filmmaker (yes, painting was his first love), but the exhibition presents this massive creative life in a unified field of reference.
Thomas Devaney
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Catalogue essays Peter Barberie, Amanda N. Bock, Martin Barnes, Karen Beckman, Amanda N. Bock, Tsitsi Jaji, Maria Antonella Pelizzari, and Samantha Gainsburg
Will travel to Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Switzerland; Fundacion Mapfre, Madrid; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
To complement the exhibition, PAFA also presents Something Clicked in Philly: David Lynch and His Contemporaries in the Richard C. von Hess Foundation Works on Paper Gallery, on view September 13 – December 28, 2014.
