David Lynch, Between Two Worlds: A Union of Art, Film and Xiu Xiu

Despite the fact that his latest directorial feature, the obscurely fascinating Inland Empire, was released almost a decade ago, David Lynch’s legacy as a filmmaker, artist and visionary is perhaps more profoundly vital today than it has ever been.

Beyond his work as a filmmaker, David Lynch has been, throughout his entire career, a prolific painter and artist, with a body of work that spans hundreds of artworks, paintings, photographs and works on paper.

Now, over 200 of these are on display at the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) in Brisbane, Australia as part of the exhibition David Lynch: Between Two Worlds. The show features Lynch’s rarely seen paintings and drawings from the 1960s as well as lithographs, a selecton of Lynch’s photographs of factories and nudes, recent large-scale paintings, and a complete retrospective of his film, video and television work.

The works are organized in three sections – ‘Man and machine’, ‘The extra-ordinary’, and ‘Psychic Aches’.

The exhibition’s curator, José Da Silva, Senior Curator at QAGOMA, describes the themes that connect the filmmaker and artist’s work as “moving between the porous divide of the body and the world it inhabits, the exhibition explores the subjects of industry and organic phenomena; representations of inner conflict; and the possibility of finding a deeper reality in our experience of the everyday.”

Two musical events accompany the exhibition: HEXA and Xiu Xiu plays the music of Twin Peaks. For HEXA, Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart joins forces with Brisbane-based composer Lawrence English to create a sound-based performance that, while accompanying Lynch’s Factory photographs, explores the relationship of sound and the body.

For Xiu Xiu plays the music of Twin Peaks, the entire band—Jamie Stewart, Angela Seo and Shayna Dunkelman—will recreate the music from the cult 1990 television series Twin Peaks originally composed by Angelo Badalamenti and David Lynch. The experience will not be unique to this exhibition, however, as Xiu Xiu will bring the performance to select audiences in the Fall, starting with London on October 8.

Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart explains: “[The music of Twin Peaks] is romantic, it is terrifying, it is beautiful, it is unnervingly sexual. The idea of holding the “purity” of the 1950s up to the cold light of a violent moon and exposing the skull beneath the frozen, worried smile has been a stunning influence on us.  Our attempt will be to play the parts of the songs as written, meaning, following the harmony melody but to arrange in the way that it has shaped us as players.”

See selections from the exhibition below.