Berlin is always a little Lynchian, especially in winter: ghostly and grimy, a place where the macabre nestles comfortably in the mundane. This year, January was even more uncanny than usual: A mysterious attack on the power grid, claimed by the obscure Volcano Group, left one of the most idyllic, villa-studded swaths of the city pitch-black and frozen for days; this interlude was followed by weeks of a strange black ice (blitz ice, in German) that descended over the city and made every step outside hazardous, no matter what hapless local government officials tried to do about it.
In the depths of all this, the first of the Pace Gallery’s posthumous exhibitions of David Lynch’s works, among them photos, paintings, lamps, and one of his earliest films—a gory, surreal short about learning the alphabet, starring his first wife, Peggy—opened at the mega-gallery’s newest outpost, a restored 1950s gas station in what was once Berlin’s American-occupied zone.
An amuse-bouche for the larger Lynch exhibition that will take place later this year, at the Pace Gallery in Los Angeles, the show, on its opening night (and many of the days that followed), saw Berliners lined up and down the block to get in, the coldest winter in 16 years notwithstanding.
This letter appears in Issue 36 of Alta Journal.
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That didn’t surprise Oliver Shultz, the exhibition’s curator. After all, the German capital has notoriously few big-ticket art collectors but no shortage of contemporary working artists. And contemporary working artists are, pretty much by definition, influenced by Lynch. (There were also free drinks, but unlike the weather, that’s pretty standard.)
Lynch was supposed to curate the show—which was, initially, going to look very different.
Shultz, who describes himself as “spoon-fed on David Lynch,” had taken a hard look at the new space, with its quintessentially American architecture. Abandoned for decades, it was restored in 2008 by a Swiss gallerist, who replaced the gas tanks with a koi pond, pine trees, and bamboo, then moved in, living there for more than a decade. Shultz thought, Why not pretend it’s David Lynch’s house and ask him to choose which works by local artists to put on the walls?
The iconic filmmaker loved the idea. In early 2025, Shultz planned to fly from New York, where he’s based, to Los Angeles to meet Lynch and talk it all over.
Then the L.A. fires broke out, and Lynch evacuated from his home. His emphysema worsened, and he died in mid-January. The Berlin show became an homage.
Lynch began his career as a painter and thought of his movies as moving paintings; considering himself first and foremost a visual artist, he also built sculptures and took photos. As Shultz chose pieces to include, he learned about Lynch’s love of Berlin, which he visited in 1999 to make images he later included in his Factory Photographs series. Several of them are on display in this show—though they won’t be in California. Black-and-white, they capture the wonderful eeriness of their time. One shows a hotel-room lamp, bright against the mirror’s dim reflection, where you can just make out the artist himself: a self-portrait in silhouette. Another is of a drive through dark woods, sunroof open.
It was Hitler, who wanted to be a painter but turned to politics after being rejected (twice) by an art school, who transformed Berlin from the center of the moviemaking world into a backwater, persecuting, murdering, or driving out much of the talent. Leading lights like Billy Wilder, Ernst Lubitsch, and Marlene Dietrich ended up in L.A. In the 1960s, it was former Berliners working in Hollywood who launched a sister city program that still runs to this day.
Inevitably part of this tradition, Lynch would return to Berlin again and again, tracing and leaving a trace—even if his hopes of purchasing the abandoned CIA listening station on a hill called Devil’s Mountain to erect a Transcendental Meditation university went unfulfilled.
By the time I visited the exhibition—described by Berlin humanities professor Annette Jael Lehmann as “really cool”—the black ice had thawed, and it was a regular winter day. Gray skies, leafless trees, a companionable litany of complaints issuing from elderly fellow riders on the elevated train.
Inside, everybody I spoke with was enthusiastic. One thirtysomething fine arts painter said he was here on a day trip. Like all the best things in Berlin, noted the Lynch fan, the exhibition was free. Then there was a life coach, with her friend. Originally from Saint Petersburg, Russia, she left in the 1990s and winters in Berlin; in her opinion, this city is far more Lynchian than Los Angeles, where she has spent time. “Too much sunshine there,” she said dismissively. “This place is much more dark.”•
Originally from San Francisco, Sally McGrane is a Berlin-based journalist who writes for the New York Times and the New Yorker, among other publications. The author of two spy novels, Moscow at Midnight and Odesa at Dawn, she is currently at work on her next book, Tomorrow in Berlin.
