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The Triennale di Milano presents David Lynch. The Air is on Fire, a major art retrospective conceived and staged by Paris’s Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain and devoted to the multiple facets of David Lynch as a visual artist.
For the first time in Italy this exhibition event brings together the movie director’s paintings, photographs, drawings, experimental films and soundtracks.
The public will have the chance to discover and rediscover David Lynch’s fine art, with never-before-seen works, and site-specific installations created specially for this exhibition.
Born in 1946 in Montana, David Lynch drew and painted throughout his childhood. In 1965 he relocated to Philadelphia and attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. It was here that he discovered his passion for moving images when, one day, alone in his studio, he noticed a light breeze gently bringing to life the objects stuck on the canvas on which he was working.
Six months later he finished making his first short film. Lynch now turned his attention away from fine art and focused primarily on film, becoming one of the world’s most talented directors. He is the youngest filmmaker ever to receive a Leone d’Oro alla Carriera at the Venice Film Festival; this consecration came in September 2006 following the screening at the Festival of his last release, INLAND EMPIRE (2006). Throughout his career as a movie maker, David Lynch has continued to produce paintings, drawings, photographs and animated shorts; in fact, he has extended his interests to other art forms, notably musical projects including the composition of several pieces for his films.
The Air is on Fire takes us into David Lynch’s studio cluttered with paintings, black cupboards full of old files and shelves packed with labelled folders containing hundreds of drawings. This is Lynch’s own beautifully kept personal collection, dating back to his high school years and displayed in Italy now for the first time.
Revealed to the Director of the Fondation Cartier, Hervé Chandès, all these works have been gathered together and specially staged for exhibition by David Lynch himself: pictures hung on large metal frames and mounted on brightly-coloured curtains, animated films projected in a tiny cinema evoking Eraserhead (1977), the sketch of a living room turned into a life-size scene. These settings give the visitor a rare insight into David Lynch’s approach to production design and his unique visual style.
Walking into the exhibition is like walking into the mind of David Lynch – with its darkest childhood memories, hidden adolescent fears and uncomfortable adult experiences. A recurring theme is the home, its dark unsettling side emerging in these disturbing canvases with their organic texture and mysterious messages. Lynch’s black humour is readily apparent even in his deepest, darkest paintings, just as his noir-like cinema offers us occasional redemptive doses of light relief. His photographs vary in subject and atmosphere, from the most sensual and dreamlike to the plain nightmarish. His nudes, in colour or black and white, develop the female archetype according to Lynch: provocative women with bright red lips and nails. His black and white photographs of urban landscapes explore the geometry of architectural forms and capture the timeless atmosphere of industrial wastelands. The Distorted Nudes series consists of digital photomontages made using erotic photographs from 1840 to 1940; here, David Lynch has created figures which, while still human, have odd protrusions or vital parts missing. Lastly, the sketches and drawings reveal the innermost aspect of Lynch’s artwork. On show in Italy for the first time, these works have been kept by the filmmaker since his adolescence and are still regularly consulted by him as a source of inspiration; they shed extraordinary light on the dark vision of his creative process and highlight the influences that have shaped his entire artistic output.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue reflecting the astonishing range and variety of this artist’s fields of interest. The book includes many of the works exhibited, commented on by David Lynch himself (in English on the CD and in the same order of appearance as published in the catalogue) in conversation with American journalist Kristine McKenna. Also featured is a discussion between Boris Groys and Andrei Ujica exploring the links between art and cinema in 20th century art with particular regard to “Lynchian” film making; this provides a theoretical understanding of the construction of the entire oeuvre of this versatile director, painter, sculptor and photographer.

La Triennale di Milano

David Lynch. The Air is on Fire
9 October 2007 – 13 January 2008
The exhibition “ David Lynch. The Air is on Fire” was conceived and is staged by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain
Cure / by : Hervé Chandes with Hélène Kelmachter and Ilana Shamoon
Admission: 8 € - 6 € - 5 €
Opening hours: 10.30 am-8.30 pm, closed Mondays