We went to David Lynch’s exhibition in Berlin and it feels like his home

David Lynch is sitting in the dark, in an armchair, smoking. He is waiting for the quinoa and broccoli to finish boiling. In those minutes, he recounts how, on a moonless night, the train he was travelling on through Yugoslavia slowed down until it stopped in the middle of nowhere. In the blowing dust, he saw a small wooden kiosk lit by lamps, moths “flipping and flying like frogs,” and bottles filled with liquids of every color—purple, green, yellow, red. It did not feel like a symbolic scene, but a sudden apparition, as if that place had remained suspended outside of time.

Arriving today in front of Pace Gallery’s Berlin location, housed in a former 1950s gas station made of concrete and red steel poles, that same sensation returns. Here too, one has the impression of being in a place left on the margins of the ordinary flow of things, a stopping point rather than a destination. The large red glass panel filtering the light in the first room transforms the space into something intimate, almost domestic. Amid the polite chatter of the Zeit Café through which the gallery is accessed, Lynch’s name, written in his familiar block-letter signature, feels almost like a joke—as if he had secretly come back to sign the wall.

The exhibition, spread across two rooms, presents paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and short films, and anticipates a major retrospective scheduled for 2026 in Los Angeles. After the first moments of emotional disorientation, visitors are enveloped in a mysterious yet surprisingly intimate dimension. In the trailer for his well-known exhibition at the Fondation Cartier, “The Air Is on Fire” (2007), Lynch said that sound gives “a mood of going back in time or being cosy inside a place.” Turning the exhibition space into a livable interior, a place that already feels inhabited, has always been part of his way of thinking about images.

David Lynch

This may be the key to reading the Berlin exhibition: for Lynch, there is no clear separation between art and domestic life. The objects surrounding him, those kept in his studio and his home, are not mere props but repositories of imagination. “It’s important to keep your things, they can trigger ideas for the future,” he once told a group of students. Objects do not illustrate his stories; they make them possible.

Observing today in Berlin his sculptural lamps—wooden structures, colored plexiglass, rough surfaces through which light filters—means looking at objects that seem to have emerged more from a daily gesture than from a formal design process. The paintings, watercolors, and small sculptures also retain this material, almost provisional quality, as if they came from a private space even before an artist’s studio. Many of the works on display were created in the studio Lynch built beneath his home in the Hollywood Hills. The same place from which, for years, he recorded his daily weather report, turning an ordinary act into a shared ritual. Art, objects, voice, light: everything was born within the same domestic ecosystem.

It hardly seems a coincidence that the largest solo exhibition dedicated to him during his lifetime, featuring more than 500 works at the Bonnefantenmuseum, was titled “Someone Is in My House”. In recent months, in addition to the auction in which his family put up for sale iconic objects and props from his films, his Hollywood home itself has been placed on the market. Photographs of the interiors revealed rooms dense with objects built, modified, and accumulated over time. Among them, two details stand out: a series of dentures kept in a drawer and a small porcelain head. The same elements reappear in a large 2018 painting, where a figure runs toward a tree while wires extend from its eyes, threaded with small heads. This is not a symbol to be deciphered; it is an object that has changed context, moving from the house to the image.

The same applies to the figures that glow as they emerge from tree bark, or to the watercolors in which sentences written in block letters—“It was Linda who first told me about Paul…,” “When did it happen?”—do not explain the scene but inhabit it, like notes left on a table. Toward the end of the second room, on small ink-and-watercolor works, amid blacks and earthy tones, a crimson red reappears, carrying the sense of a crime, of something that truly happened. That red runs through his entire body of work: the fire evoked in Fire Walk with Me and the one that resurfaces in Fire Is Coming, the animation created for Flying Lotus.

This time, however, the fire truly reached the Hollywood Hills and took him from us. What remains are the objects: lamps, heads, dentures, painted surfaces. Material traces of an imagination that was never separate from everyday life. To look at the Berlin exhibition, then, is not so much to enter Lynch’s symbolic world as to step into his domestic space—a place where things, before becoming art, were simply part of his life.