For several years, David Lynch, director of “Eraserhead,” “Mulholland Drive,” and television’s “Twin Peaks,” has also explored his interest in other artistic areas, producing drawings, watercolors, photographs, paintings, and sound installations. Now the Musée du Dessin et de l’Estampe Originale in Gravelines in northern France is showing his latest endeavor, a series of lithographs titled “Suite de Paris” that he made in France.
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Lynch’s interest in the arts goes back to his early years, when he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as a teenager. “Before making movies, I wanted to be a painter," he says in a statement for the show. "I was obsessed with painting and the still image." His new enthusiasm for lithography arose when, during his 2007 exhibition at the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the foundation's director, Hervé Chandès, gave him a tour of the Parisian lithograph studio Idem, where Matisse, Picasso, and Miró all worked. The director fell in love with the medium and has since produced around 100 lithographs at the studio. In 2008, he had his first show of the prints, titled “I See Myself,” at the Galeries Lafayette department store in Paris.
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The exhibition in Gravelines, which will be on view through October 17, includes 12 red, yellow, and black prints made from zinc plates. A larger series of 62 black-and-white works on Japan paper includes “I See Myself,” the piece that gave its name to Lynch’s previous exhibition, As in his films, Lynch meticulously frames his images and explores themes familiar to viewers of his movies: loneliness, love, eros, dreams, and death. The museum is also showing his first three short features, “The Alphabet,” “The Amputee,” and “The Grandmother.” Then, for those who still can’t get enough of David Lynch’s eerie world, the Frank Gehry-designed Cinémathèque Française in Paris will hold a retrospective of all of the director’s films in October.
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