Never-Before-Seen David Lynch Artworks Bound for Berlin Show

It’s been three years since Pace Gallery signed famed artist-turned-filmmaker David Lynch and hosted his last New York exhibition. If the resounding success of his recent estate sale is any indication, Lynch’s death this January has dimmed none of his enigma. Fortunately, the and  director also made a lot of similarly haunting fine art. On January 29, 2026, Pace will unveil several never-before-seen Lynch creations as part of his second solo show at the gallery. The Berlin presentation “builds on an idea Lynch was actively developing last year,” Pace senior director Genevieve Day told me over email.

Lynch famously started out studying art, not film. He first attended the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design in Washington, D.C., then the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston, before heading to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia after trying and failing to study under the Viennese Expressionist master Oskar Kokoschka in Salzburg.

In 1967, while still a student in the City of Brotherly Love, Lynch made his first “moving painting,” Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)—generally considered his debut film. Ten years and seven shorts later, Lynch directed his first feature, Eraserhead (1977). The rest is history.

But Lynch kept making and exhibiting art throughout his cinematic career. By the time Pace signed him in 2022, he’d amassed an extensive, consistent CV of group and solo shows from Dallas to Düsseldorf, including several with his representation, the Santa Monica-based Kayne Griffin Corcoran gallery, which Pace eventually snapped up. His first posthumous show, a sprawling exhibition of works on paper, photography, and prints titled “David Lynch: Up In Flames,” opened this June and remains on view at Prague’s DOX Centre for Contemporary Art through February.

Pace plans to offer a more focused cross-section of Lynch’s practice at the Berlin space it opened in a defunct gas station with Galerie Judin this past January. The show will feature previously unseen mixed media paintings, and watercolors housed in frames that Lynch himself built. Three lamps, the likes of which appeared in Lynch’s 2022 Pace debut, will also “punctuate the gallery with their uncanny illumination,” per Pace’s press announcement, “each an artifact of the physical and atmospheric environments conjured by Lynch.” Several of his early short films will also be screened at the show “in dialogue with the paintings,” Day noted.

Whereas Lynch’s last Pace show highlighted his latest endeavors, the works slated for next month’s untitled exhibition will span 1999 through 2022. The earliest specimens will hail from a little-seen series of black and photographs that Lynch snapped at the turn of the millennia, immortalizing Berlin’s signature industrial scenes. These shots ground Lynch’s relationship with the city and Europe more broadly.

Next month’s German outing will prove but an appetizer for the main course to come. Next autumn, Pace plans to hold a much larger, sweeping survey of Lynch’s lifelong oeuvre at the mega gallery’s three-year old Los Angeles outpost, celebrating the filmmaker’s unparalleled talent in the city he called home for over half a century.