Los Angeles through the eyes of David Lynch was never going to look quite ordinary. Now, Angelenos can step into the late filmmaker and artist’s strange, atmospheric vision of the city at a new photography exhibition opening this fall.
David Lynch: LA is at the Pace Gallery in Los Angeles from September 19 through December 23, 2026. The exhibition brings together five photographic series created between 1979 and 2008.
It marks the first presentation of Lynch’s work in his home city since his passing in 2025.
David Lynch: LA comes to Los Angeles
For more than 50 years, Lynch called Los Angeles home. He arrived in the city in 1972 and quickly became fascinated by its distinctive light, architecture, streets, and darker, more mysterious side.
That relationship with L.A. is the focus of this exhibition, which explores the city not simply as a physical place but as an atmosphere and feeling.
Lynch’s photographs capture everything from distinctive architecture and industrial landscapes to human figures, everyday objects and surreal compositions. Lynch had a way of transforming the familiar into something decidedly uncanny.
What you’ll see at the David Lynch exhibition
The exhibition brings together five photographic series, offering a look at the artist’s work beyond his better-known films and television projects.
Figures and Smoke
Five large-scale color photographs from Lynch’s Figures and Smoke series anchor the exhibition.
The tightly cropped portraits feature women’s faces surrounded by drifting smoke, creating hazy, dreamlike images that feel both beautiful and unsettling.
Lynch’s Portraits of Los Angeles
Lynch also turned his camera toward the city itself. His photographs of Los Angeles focus on its architecture, industrial edges and overlooked urban spaces, capturing the city with the same cinematic eye he brought to his films.
Rather than showing the postcard version of L.A., these images explore the stranger, more atmospheric side of the city.
The Nude
The exhibition also features a selection of Lynch’s black-and-white photographs exploring the nude.
The human body is transformed into abstract, almost landscape-like forms, blurring the boundaries between figure and environment.
The Couch Series
In his Couch Series, Lynch revisits the traditional reclining figure found throughout art history.
Using photographic layering and distortion, he multiplies and blurs the figures, creating surreal compositions inspired in part by early photographic techniques.
Kits
Perhaps the most unexpected series in the exhibition, Kits reflects Lynch’s fascination with everyday objects and the mechanics of how things work.
Inspired by his childhood interest in building model airplanes, Lynch photographed the process of disassembling a fish, chicken and duck, accompanied by instructions for putting them back together.
It’s a particularly Lynchian take on the ordinary — taking something familiar and turning it into something strange.
📅 Dates: September 19–December 23, 2026
📍 Location: Pace Gallery, Los Angeles
