- An exhibition of never-before-seen artwork from legendary polymath David Lynch will be held at Pace Gallery Berlin from January 2026.
- The exhibition, which runs from January 29 to March 22, highlights the late filmmaker’s vision across media, bringing together a select group of paintings, sculptures, watercolours, and early short films.
- The show precedes a major exhibition of Lynch’s work slated for fall 2026 at Pace’s gallery in the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles.
David Lynch had an eye for the otherworldly. Over a remarkable career that spanned more than five decades, the legendary polymath managed to weave an intricate and extraordinary world of mystery, intrigue and Midwest melancholy that reverberated well beyond the confines of the Middle America that he was portraying.
Through his award-winning films Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart and Mulholland Drive, alongside the landmark television series Twin Peaks, Lynch painted a picture of modern life that was equal parts visceral and bleak.
His work stood out like an Edward Hopper still life, abandoning the maelstrom of visual material that defined American cinema to become something entirely different. But before David Lynch—the director, there was David Lynch—the visual artist.
David Lynch Exhibition at Pace Gallery
In January 2026, a year after the legendary filmmaker’s death, Pace Gallery will pay tribute to the man behind the movies. The Berlin art and design institution is presenting a solo exhibition of never-before-seen works by David Lynch highlighting his vision across mediums and bringing together some of the enigmatic artist’s most unique creations.
Held in Berlin from January 29 to March 22, 2026, the solo show will feature a select group of paintings, sculptures, watercolours, and early short films from Lynch’s archives. According to Pace, the extensive collection of work is rife with unsettling imagery, drawing on the visual language of Surrealism while also bringing together both text and storytelling.
“At their core is a pervasive unease that speaks to the subconscious realities of contemporary life,“ Pace Gallery said in a statement. “The watercolours—both monochrome and in the artist’s signature palette of reds, inky blues, and bursts of yellow—will appear alongside paintings, each housed in frames designed by Lynch himself.“
Additionally, three upright lamp sculptures made of steel, resin, Plexiglass, plaster, and wood will feature, illuminating the gallery with an uncanny curiosity, playing off the unique physical and atmospheric environments conjured by Lynch.
According to Pace Gallery, the exhibition will also include a series of photographs taken by Lynch at abandoned industrial sites throughout Berlin in 1999, touching on the artist’s history with the German capital and Europe at large.
“The factory photographs, as this series is known, draw on his fascination with the aesthetic beauty and emotional aura of smokestacks, chimneys, broken windows, and heavy machinery,“ Pace wrote. “In the strange visual juxtapositions of this decaying urban landscape and others, Lynch found beauty, channelling these moods into his artwork and seeking affinities wherever he travelled.“
David Lynch—The Artist
For Lynch fans, the new exhibition showcases a side of the famed director that often goes unexplored. While his films helped make surrealism mainstream in the 1980s, Lynch’s early life centred around more traditional art practices.
In 1964, Lynch enrolled at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, before transferring to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and later winding up at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts studying painting. It was here that Lynch conceived his first ‘moving painting’, Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times), which would help lay the foundations for an incredible filmmaking career. But while he made his home in Hollywood, Lynch always considered himself a visual artist first.
“I don’t know why people expect art to make sense when they accept the fact that life doesn’t make sense,“ he told the Los Angeles Times in 1989.
The David Lynch solo exhibition will be on view in Berlin from January 29 through March 22, 2026. It precedes a major exhibition slated for autumn 2026 at Pace’s gallery in the artist’s hometown of Los Angeles.
