David Lynch - The Air is on Fire
26th september 2010 / 16th january 2011

The American visual artist David Lynch (b. 1946) opens the newly renovated GL STRAND with the exhibition, The Air is on Fire. The film director behind the films Blue Velvet, Eraserhead and the legendary TV series Twin Peaks has achieved cult status worldwide, but long before he threw himself into cinematography, he studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

In the exhibition, visitors can explore his artistic universe - from the early works from high school in the 1960s to the latest - created in the days before the opening. It displays paintings, drawings, manipulated photographs, lithographs, watercolors, early experimental and interactive sound sculpture on all three floors and a large light sculpture in the courtyard with the artist's signature bent in neon.

In his works David Lynch is concerned with our mental and emotional states. About the latent dangers that could threaten the domestic idyll and dysfunctional love life. The works affect the through-the irrational. What cannot be captured in words.

Typically the paintings are characterized by a pronounced darkness. In the paintings of Bob, Lynch explores other recurring themes: paranoia and loss of innocence. Bob's relationship with other people is strained. He is violent, has strange dreams and is visited by the vicious Mr. Redman.

David Lynch has created two sculptures especially for the exhibition at GL STRAND. The sculptures are inspired by Copenhagen and demonstrates an artist who never runs out of ideas.

The works on paper contains lithography, drawing and watercolor - both abstract and figurative. Lynch is working very tangible with the opportunities of the lithographic stones and its many gradations between black and white. The drawings cover both still lifes and life drawings, including a number of man-machine studies, just as a single self-portrait is represented. That Lynch is a child of the postwar period can be seen in the fascination of weapons, warplanes and fire in watercolors. The watercolors are whimsical juxtapositions of elements in small absurd stories.

A cinema shows a serie of Lynch's early experimental short films, as well as later short films. Themes about violence and abuse are combined with grotesque humour is repeted in these experimental films.

Distorted Nudes is a series of manipulated photographs of twisted naked human bodies,based om a set of of erotic photographs from 1840-1940 that are digitally maipulated by David Lynch. Some places have added color and thus adds a distinctive surreal element.

The biggest expansive group of works in the exhibition are the Binder works which have an air of uncensored thoughts from more than 40 years of artistic production. More than 400 drawings, notes and sketches done on everything from napkins, matchboxes and yellow post-it. David Lynch has collected those since his youth and now they will be exhibited for the first time in The Air is on Fire.

“The Air is on Fire" is created at the initiative of Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Paris