Smoke and Jasmine on La Brea, Pace Shows David Lynch’s Los Angeles Photographs
Five photographic series made between 1979 and 2008 trace the director’s adopted city through nudes, smoke, architecture and disassembled fish.
On September 19, Pace opened LA, an exhibition of photographs by David Lynch, at its gallery at 1201 South La Brea Avenue. The gallery calls it the first presentation of his work in his home city since his passing in 2025, and it stays on view through December 23.
The show gathers five series Lynch made between 1979 and 2008. Five large-scale color photographs from Figures and Smoke anchor the rooms, tightly cropped faces of women with smoke drifting from their red-stained mouths. Around them hang his black-and-white portraits of Los Angeles architecture, nudes that dissolve the body into landscape, the reclining figures of the Couch Series and Kits, in which he took apart a fish, a chicken and a duck and wrote wry instructions for putting them back together.
The city shaped him early. Lynch moved to Los Angeles in 1972 as a fellow at the American Film Institute and was given the stables at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills, where he lived and worked for five years and made Eraserhead. Pace writes that he arrived in the night and woke to the scent of jasmine and the Southern California light.
“Like the best artists, there is a mystery in his work that becomes both illuminating and more confounding the more closely you look,” Genevieve Day, senior director at Pace in Los Angeles, told Wallpaper. “I hope people come away with a deeper understanding of David Lynch as a visual artist,” she added.
There is more to come. “This exhibition, focusing specifically on Lynch’s photo-based work, is a prelude to a much broader retrospective that LACMA is in the early stages of preparing,” Day said. Pace notes that the museum is in discussion with other museums about that show. Until then, LA remains on view on La Brea through December 23.
