David Lynch spent decades making Los Angeles feel strange on screen. Now the city is seeing itself through his camera.

At Pace Gallery in Los Angeles, David Lynch: LA brings together five photographic series created between 1979 and 2008, marking the first time these bodies of work have been shown in dialogue with one another. It’s also the first presentation of Lynch’s work in his home city since his death in 2025.

Lynch arrived in Los Angeles in 1970 to study at the American Film Institute, and would go on to call the city home for more than 50 years. He lived and worked for a time in the stables of Greystone Mansion while making Eraserhead, the start of a relationship with LA that would later run through films like Lost Highway, Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire.

But Lynch was never only a filmmaker.

He started out as a painter, and throughout his career, photography, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, music and film all existed side by side. At Pace, the photographs make clear just how connected those worlds really were.

The exhibition moves between Figures and Smoke, where tightly cropped faces emerge through clouds of smoke; photographs of LA’s architecture and industrial edges; studies of the nude; the distorted, reclining figures of his Couch Series; and the wonderfully strange Kits, in which Lynch documented the disassembly of a fish, a chicken and a duck as though they were model kits waiting to be put back together.

Together, they hold many of the things we’ve come to call Lynchian: beauty that feels slightly wrong, ordinary objects made unsettling, darkness sitting just beneath the surface.

Only this time, there’s no film set.

David Lynch: LA is on view at Pace Gallery, 1201 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, through December 22, 2026.

Photos: Courtesy of Pace Gallery