David Lynch: The Art Life

David Lynch needs no introduction. The adjectives derived from his surname have become an established label for "strange" films that uncharacteristically deal with narrative, cinematic time or bear traces of surrealism. But how did he view his work and how did he place it in the context of his life?

Lynch dedicated the documentary Life in Art to his youngest daughter, as evidenced by the intimacy of his recollections of childhood, adolescence and early artistic work, which he concludes with the first flap of his debut, Eraserhead (1977).

For an hour and a half, David Lynch comes to the fore as a painter, sculptor and musician for whom the film is a synthesis of all the artistic disciplines in which he himself is active. The present is represented by the studio in Lynch's home, from which he had to be evacuated earlier this year. The past is represented by a multitude of image archives. The two lines then organically merge into a portrait of a complex artist who, for once, does not open the door to bizarre fictional worlds, but instead lets us into his own, private one.
 

The film warm-up to the exhibition David Lynch: Up in Flames. DOX Center for Contemporary Art.