David Lynch: The Unified Field

by Robert Cozzolino

Overview

David Lynch is internationally renowned as a filmmaker, but it is less known that he began his creative life as a visual artist and has maintained a devoted studio practice, developing an extensive body of painting, prints, photography, and drawing. Featuring work from all periods of Lynch’s career, this book documents Lynch’s first major museum exhibition in the United States, bringing together works held in American and European collections and from the artist’s studio. Much like his movies, many of Lynch’s artworks revolve around suggestions of violence, dark humor, and mystery, conveying an air of the uncanny. This is often conveyed through the addition of text, wildly distorted forms, and disturbances in the paint fields that surround or envelop his figures. While a few relate to his film projects, most are independent works of art that reveal a parallel trajectory. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, David Lynch: The Unified Field brings together ninety-five paintings, drawings, and prints from 1965 to the present, often unified by the recurring motif of the home as a site of violence, memories, and passion. Other works explore the odd, tender, and mincing aspects of relationships. Highlighting many works that have rarely been seen in public, including early work from his critical years in Philadelphia (1965–70), this catalog offers a substantial response to dealer Leo Castelli's comment when he enthusiastically viewed Lynch’s work in 1987, “I would like to know how he got to this point; he cannot be born out of the head of Zeus.”

Published in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520283961
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	11/28/2014
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	622,669
Product dimensions:	10.80(w) x 11.10(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Dr. Robert Cozzolino is Curator of Modern Art and Senior Curator at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) and has organized over thirty exhibitions at PAFA, including Jacob Lawrence’s Hiroshima (2008), George Tooker: A Retrospective (2009), Narcissus in the Studio: Artists’ Portraits and Self-Portraits (2010), and The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making Their World (2012). A champion of underrepresented artists and uncommon perspectives on well-known artists, Dr. Cozzolino has been called the “curator of the dispossessed” for his attention to the underdog.

Editorial Reviews

10/27/2014
Acclaimed director David Lynch began his artistic career not in film or television but as a student of painting and drawing at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. This lavish volume collects the brilliant, and in many cases bizarre, paintings and drawings that Lynch has created over the past 45 years. Featuring 116 plates and an extensive contextualizing essay by Cozzolino, the curator of modern art at PAFA, this handsome book brings Lynch’s fine art work into new focus. Many of the paintings offer visual clues to Lynch’s film projects and others represent dark corners of Lynch’s brain. Cozzolino draws many of the connections between Lynch’s work and life, including the impact of Lynch’s longstanding practice of meditation and the influence of Philadelphia on Lynch’s work. What’s most provocative about Lynch, in both his films and his paintings, is his ability to hint at reality’s underlying contradictions and complexity. He works primarily in black, or black-on-black, and often seems more attuned to body parts than people. Many of Lynch’s paintings can initially be viscerally disturbing or confusing, but with Lynch, there is always the promise of a deeper meaning beyond the surface. This impeccable collection of art confirms Lynch’s position as a gifted polymath—and one of the country’s most important artists working today. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Lynch’s last Philadelphia canvases are brutally textural, integrating cigarette butts and filters, matted horse-hair, and bits of unidentifiable petrified organic matter. His more recent work, characterized by broad paint strokes and large-scale dramatic canvases, is more polished in its perversity."

The New York Review of Books - J. Hoberman

"Lynch is at his best when grasping just how unsavory we can find deterioration disrupting the mundane areas of our life, especially when evoking it as a reflection of human good and evil, and that holds true in his visual art. . . . There’s a definite vision and storytelling with the mix of text and image in the galleries."

Hyperallergic - Allison Meier

"He was, and remains, fond of biomorphic shapes, the incorporation of texts, working with textures, playing with dimensionality . . . David Lynch began as a painter — he still is a painter."

The Boston Globe - Mark Feeney

"Late works find him tapping into primal fantasies of the psychotic annihilation of self and the other."

The New York Times - Ken Johnson

"Impressively curated by Robert Cozzolino, The Unified Field makes a case for considering Lynch as 'an artist who happens to make film as part of his expression.'"

The Los Angeles Review of Books - Jonathan P. Eburne

"it is fascinating to see Lynch's noncinematic work, especially the earliest canvases . . . from January 1966 through the spring of 1967."

Courier-Post - Fred B. Adelson

02/01/2015
Appearing close together are two vastly different books featuring the eclectic work of writer, director, photographer, and painter David Lynch (b. 1946), best known for his films Eraserhead (1977) and Blue Velvet (1986), and the TV series Twin Peaks (1990–91). The Factory Photographs is a catalog of a London show containing dozens of graphically stunning black-and-white images of abandoned industrial landscapes and still lifes that illustrate postapocalyptic, dystopian decay yet are vibrant with texturally rich surfaces and curvilinear patterns. The compelling photos have a melancholy beauty and are reminiscent of the familiar Lynchian focus on the world's underbelly. Aesthetically comparable to the abstract work of such greats as Bill Brandt and Lewis Baltz, these are accompanied by a short interview with the artist and an informative essay by curator Giloy-Hirtz. Throughout his life Lynch has also devoted considerable energies to painting and drawing, starting before he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in the 1960s. And while he's been praised for the avant-garde sensibility he's brought to mainstream film, his 2-D visual art is also marked by similar predilections toward viscera, violence, and villainy. The Unified Field accompanies the first major museum exhibition (at the PAFA) devoted to the noncinematic Lynch, with nearly 100 works made over the course of five decades. There's a lot to take in, with an interesting progression of styles and almost always with some degree of physical or emotional grotesquerie on display. Earnest and heartfelt, much of Lynch's work manages to be paradoxically repellent and attractive, such as the thick impasto paintings of persons eating or punishing themselves. Early works on paper reveal crisp drawing talents. A trenchant essay by curator Cozzolino analyzes the work quite effectively. VERDICT Both volumes expand greatly the scope of our knowledge of auteur and impresario Lynch and will appeal to readers interested in contemporary art and the life of this modernist polymath.—Douglas F. Smith, Oakland P.L.

Library Journal

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