Cercle Cité Exhibition
About
Something out of the ordinary
David Lynch, while being an acclaimed filmmaker, always considered himself a painter. Working with a variety of media over the course of his career, such as drawing, painting, sculpture, lithography or even music and design, his rich and unique artistic work is less known to the audience than his filmic.
The photographic series Small Stories shows a part of his less known work, consisting of fifty-five black and white photographs. These little stories, exhibited at Cercle Cité’s Ratskeller in a scenery of flickering light, sound and red curtains that immerses the visitor in Lynch’s fantastic world. In these partly disturbing images, inhabited by shapes, figures and phantoms, haunted rooms, dreamlike landscapes, familiar and at the same time diverted spaces, the visitor can find the recurring motifs of the artistic and cinematic universe of David Lynch. The images on display are memories, marked by light and darkness of the 1950’s suburbia or big frightening cities, of a loving family or violence behind closed unknown doors. They are also dreams, conjuring Lynch’s “longing for something out of the ordinary to happen”.
Accompanying the photographs are weekly screenings of early short films by David Lynch. His first ever film, shot in 1967 and titled Six Men Getting Sick, visualizes the passage from painting and sculpture to the moving image. While this work reveals the multimedia potential later developed in Lynch’s multidisciplinary artistic Œuvre, it is also Lynch’s first introduction to the medium of film, while he was studying at the Art Academy in Philadelphia. By including these very early film works, the exhibition Small Stories by David Lynch, shown within the framework of the Luxembourg City Film Festival 2023, thematizes Lynch’s initiation to film when he was primarily working as an artist, while showing his artistic practice when today, he is a praised filmmaker.
David Lynch’s strength is undeniably his play with ambiguity and his understanding of duality as an integral part of life. Driven by curiosity and imagination, his artistic work as well as his films look closely at the everyday, the common, the ugly, the hidden, angst. They lift the curtain to reveal the eerie and magical, the bizarre and gloomy; Lynch succeeds in building a unique narrative and inviting us in his very own dream world.
More information on : https://cerclecite.lu/fr
Organization
Cercle Cité
With the support of
Luxembourg City Film Festival
Curators
Anastasia Chaguidouline et Alex Reding