From now until the end of May 2025, Galerie Hus is running an exhibition of 10 lithographs by David Lynch, inspired by the 1963 Federico Fellini film 8 ½. Lynch is considered to be one of the most iconic film directors of our age, but he was not only a film director but was a multimedia artist and writer as well.
His career spanned nearly six decades, with work ranging from painting, drawing, photography, printmaking, sculpture, music, and film. His creative endeavors brought him to Paris, where he formed a relationship with the historically located printing house Idem in Montparnasse. There, he could have been seen in typical form, with his sharp white haircut, smoking a cigarette while working on his lithographs.
Idem has been owned by various individuals but remains a leading venue for artists around the world. Lynch was in excellent company given that Matisse, Picasso, Miro, Braque, Chagall, Léger, and Cocteau, (just to name a few), have all had their lithographs printed from the same local. When Lynch first visited the fine art printing studio located in Montparnasse in Paris, he felt an immediate connection. The space was alive with the combination of the stone, the location, the ideas, and the people that created a mood that drew him in.
Lynch started as a painter, starting in his childhood, and he eventually enrolled as a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Arts in Philadelphia in the mid-1960s. It was while he attended the school that he experienced a pivotal moment in his creative life. While he was working on his painting, he began to view the image in front of him move as if on its own. Sensations of movement and wind entered the world on his canvas, and his desire to experiment with a “moving painting” began then and there. His first short film, Six Men Getting Sick (1967), would be the first realization of Lynch’s surrealist vision, incorporating a mix of painting and animation into his looping vision.
For Lynch, ideas were the core of any project and were not specific to any particular medium. Abstraction, mystery, or the uncanny could be depicted in a painting, and could just as easily be translated into the various attributes of what is now synonymous with Lynchian films. In the same form that paintings contain an atmosphere, his films were about creating a unique aura that veered towards surrealism and mystery, notorious for being hard to fully understand. As Lynch describes, “All of my paintings are dramas, violent and organic. They have to be done violently, in a primitive and crude way. I didn’t learn to paint the brighter sides of life. But I’ve always loved both sides and I’ve always believed that to appreciate one side, you have to know the other –the more darkness you concentrate, the more light you see”.
An important inspiration to Lynch was the Italian director and screenwriter Federico Fellini, whose work was characterized by distinct methods of conveying dreamlike, hallucinatory images into moments of ordinary life altering the language of cinema as a result. Influenced early on by the Neorealist movement, his pursuit of a distinct personal style of expression distanced him from Neorealist purists. 8 ½ is one of his most celebrated films, depicting a film director stuck in creative paralysis. The overstimulation of his environment with his beseeching film crew, actresses, air-headed mistress, and distant wife leads the director to retreat into a world of fantasy. The film is highly self-referential. By Fellini’s count, he had made 7 ½ films by 1963, which would make 8 ½ his next film counting from his catalog.
The film is about the making of a film and serves as a portrait of just being alive and dealing with the compulsion of wanting to be creative. As the director says, “I really have nothing to say…but I want to say it all the time”. His answers seem to be embedded in the past and are reinvented and reanalyzed through fantasy and surreal elements.
While Lynch and Fellini didn’t have many encounters, the few they had were memorable. Lynch paid homage to the Fellini film through this lithograph series that was initially created in 2018 and presented at the Maison du Diable at the cultural space of the Fellini Foundation in Sion, Switzerland.
Lynch had a special creative connection to lithographs. According to Lynch, “There’s a little story in my head for each lithograph. Sometimes characters are suggested, then a story is born, and from that story, the still image is born. You know, all of this is enriched by the organic qualities of the stone, the ink, and the process. It’s not inspired by films, it’s inspired by ideas, and films are also inspired by ideas, so it’s the same process: ideas, stories, characters. It’s theoretically possible for a lithograph to inspire a scene or an entire film, it’s entirely possible.”
The organic elements imparted from the stone can be seen blending into Lynch’s artistic contributions to each lithograph, creating a unique effect where each print has different gestures made with the ink, some restrained within its borders, and others exceeding them. For Lynch, there are links between the exercise of filmmaking and lithography. The starting point of black ink serves as the creative canvas where ideas and figures emerge or disappear, and each frame is dictated according to the stone (in the instance of lithographs). In the same manner that some rules or parameters preside over a single image or frame of film, both lithographs and film are similarly bound and expressive of Lynch’s vision.