Take a trip into the mind of one of contemporary culture’s most radical and visionary figures, as we host the first major UK exhibition of work by pioneering film director and artist David Lynch, featuring over 60 weird and wonderful works dating from the late 1960s to the present day.
Best known for films such as The Elephant Man, Blue Velvet, and TV show Twin Peaks, many of us are already familiar with Lynch’s on-screen vision, but since graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he has also produced a prolific body of work across painting, sculpture, photography and drawing, which collectively unfolds the inner workings of everyday life. In his work, the mundane provides an opportunity for dark, quirky inner exploration.
Lynch’s surfaces, which are scratched, charred and three-dimensional in form, are like windows into the soul. My Head is Disconnected is a major exhibition of his wall-based and sculptural works, four themes bind together an artistic career that has developed over more than four decades.
The first chapter of the exhibition is titled City on Fire, and explores extreme, dystopian landscapes and how they affect the people that inhabit them. Nothing Here looks at the human psyche and the fragility of the mind through a set of broad characters. Industrial Empire presents drawings on the themes of labour, industry and the environment. The final chapter of the exhibition, Bedtime Stories, features new works by Lynch that fold his dark narratives and characters together in their own universe.
Alongside My Head is Disconnected, David Lynch at HOME will also feature specially curated music events and a retrospective of films.
“It is all of a piece, all-too-believably unbelievable… Lynch the artist might be taken for a character from the world he paints, the madman with the easel, cackling in the attic.” – The Guardian
★★★★ “Anyone looking for insights into the mind that produced Twin Peaks and The Elephant Man won’t be disappointed.” – Daily Telegraph (behind paywall)
“Those familiar with Lynch’s on-screen visions, particularly Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive, will recognise many of the recurring motifs that crop up in the exhibition… You will come away with a renewed appreciation of this singular artist. My Head is Disconnected reminds us that Lynch is first and foremost a humourist… A strange trip into a brilliant mind.” – Little White Lies
“My head is disconnected couldn’t do much better to summarise his ideas and ethos… The hanging artwork and cinematic features go hand-in-hand in exploring ideas of absurdity and an ethereal reality… These are visions and thoughts that only Lynch could conjure.” Far Out magazine
“A wonderful display of Lynch’s artistic ability… Not only is it varied in size, colour and texture, it is also varied in emotion, heart, and feeling… I urge everyone to visit and be submerged in the Lynchian wave.” – Mancunion
“His film work may have firmly entered the cultural canon, yet Lynch still has the capacity to surprise… It is impossible not to think of his films, and to hunt for links between the work… There is an obvious sense of foreboding and terror in the imagery of his paintings, yet Lynch’s dark sense of humour is also evident. ” – Creative Review (behind paywall)
“If grim is your thing, you’ll love it.” – iNews
“Make of it what you will and take that away with you. And it’s a good thing too, because the Lynchian mystery is one of the last of its kind: it will remain a mystery.” – The State of the Arts
“A fascinating opportunity to understand the work of David Lynch in a broader context… The aesthetic that emerges is that of an artist with a compellingly cohesive vision of the ‘Death of America’, and the search for meaningful identity in a strange new world.” – The Double Negative
“Part of the fascination with [David] Lynch is his constant experimentation – the success or failure of a piece is not in the aesthetic qualities of the finished painting, but in how it expresses an idea – or the feeling of an idea. Lynch’s work is highly individual and seems to exist in its own parallel world.” – Literati
Commissioned and produced by HOME and Manchester International Festival in association with the David Lynch Foundation UK and Kayne Griffin Corcoran