New in paperback, this revelatory book features rarely-seen multimedia works by the revered cult filmmaker David Lynch showing how he applies his powerful imagination and visual language across genres.

David Lynch has always been in the spotlight as a filmmaker, directing some of the most iconic movies ever made, but as a visual artist, he is less widely known. Lynch delights in the physicality of painting and likes to stimulate all the senses in his work. This new paperback edition brings together Lynch’s paintings, photography, drawings, sculpture and installation, and stills from his films. Many of these works reveal the dark underpinnings behind Lynch’s often-macabre movies. Others explore his fascination with texture and collage. Throughout, Lynch’s characteristic style — surreal, stylish, and even humorous — shines through. An introduction by music journalist and Lynch biographer Kristine McKenna, along with a thought-provoking essay by curator Stijn Huijts, offers fascinating new information and perspectives on Lynch’s life and career. This book reveals an unexplored facet of Lynch’s oeuvre and affirms that he is as brilliant a visual artist as he is a filmmaker.

About the Author: 

Kristine McKenna is an American journalist, critic, and curator. She has written for Artforum, The New York Times, ARTNews, Vanity Fair, The Washington Post, and Rolling Stone Magazine. Stijn Huijts is Artistic Director of the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht in the Netherlands.

An in-depth collection of the work and life of perhaps cinema and TV’s greatest cult creator, David Lynch.

In 1990 David Lynch released ‘Twin Peaks’ and television would never quite be the same again. Ostensibly a mystery serial drama, the series introduced viewers to a surreal and eccentric world of uncanny and camp strangeness that has gone down in pop culture legend. With his films, the most famous of which are ‘Mulholland Drive’ and ‘Blue Velvet’, but which also include ‘The Elephant Man’, 1984’s ‘Dune’ and the Palme d’Or winning ‘Wild at Heart’, Lynch created similarly strange, sylised and perplexing worlds, rich in invention.

Across his career Lynch turned his attention to film, television, art, music, photography, Transcendental Meditation and – more recently – nightclub design and weather forecasting, and his sources of influence and inspiration are equally diverse. These range across painting, photography, cinema, literature and beyond, and collectively help unlock his hugely influential work.

David Lynch: His Work, His World  brings Lynch's complete output together into one visually led collection, and tells the full story of how he worked, created, thought and lived.

About the Author:

Tom Huddleston is an author, journalist and musician based in North London. His novels include several science fiction and fantasy stories for younger readers including the eco-futuristic FloodWorld trilogy. He spent a decade on the Film desk at Time Out magazine and is now a freelance Film & TV journalist writing for, among others, The Guardian and Little White Lies.

Experimenting with all forms of artistic creation, from painting to photography, from drawing to sound creation, David Lynch’s work appears to be the most protean of our time. In 2007, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain presented the exhibition-event The Air Is on Fire, which unveiled Lynch’s photographic and pictorial work. Nearly fifteen years later, the Fondation Cartier will publish Digital Nudes, an exceptional collection of the artist’s photographs dedicated to female nudes, as a follow-up to Nudes, published in 2017.

Second installment of the Lynchian saga devoted to the photographic exploration of the female body, Digital Nudes brings together a corpus of previously unpublished digital images in line with the aesthetics of Nudes’ analog photographs, while experimenting with the possibilities offered by digital technology.

Kaleidoscopic visions of legs, arms, or undefined curves, chiaroscuro portraits, photographs of varnished nails and lacquered mouths... So many examples of David Lynch’s treatment of one of the greatest artistic subjects, the female nude, which here becomes an ode to femininity, an invitation to contemplation and creative freedom.

Ten years after the exhibition The Air Is on Fire, which unveiled David Lynch’s photographic and painting work, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain will publish a book featuring more than a hundred black-and-white and color images of feminine nudes realized by the artist.

These erotically-charged photographs are close to abstraction, offering kaleidoscopic visions of the woman. They attest to David Lynch’s fascination with the infinite variety of the human body, while being in line with his cinematographic work.