David Lynch, “Boy Lights Fire,” mixed media on cardboard, 2011
DAVID LYNCH
Tilton Gallery
8 East 76th St. between Madison & Fifth Aves.
Tuesday – Saturday through April 21, free
212-737-2221
www.jacktiltongallery.com
davidlynch.com
In such films as Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, and Blue Velvet and the television series Twin Peaks, Montana-born writer-director David Lynch created off-kilter worlds that reveal the dark underbelly of contemporary society, an alternate reality that is both oddball and frightening. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that his artwork explores similar territory. Lynch, who has also made such albums as BlueBob, Polish Night Music, and last year’s solo debut, Crazy Clown Time, is currently in the midst of his first gallery show in New York since 1989, an eponymously titled display that continues through Saturday at the Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side. Lynch’s offbeat combination of humor and danger is evident throughout the two-floor exhibit, which ranges from dreamlike, surreal black-and-white “Distorted Nude” photographs of body parts to haunting yet playful small watercolors to large-scale mixed-media paintings that include snippets of text and figures and brownish clumps that evoke such artists as Dieter Roth and the Brothers Quay in addition to Francis Bacon, Jean Dubuffet, and Henri Matisse. In the triptych “Boy Lights Fire,” a child with impossibly long arms is playing with matches over the head of a “neighbor girl he likes a lot.” In “Bob’s Second Dream,” a tiny creature sticks out from the cardboard base with the note “his head was shaped different,” a woman’s face is split in half by the words “I don’t love you,” and nearby it is declared that “everything is fuckin broke.” Jolly old St. Nick floats off in the distance in “No Santa Claus.” And in “Boy’s Night Out,” a father is grasping a plug while his son, holding a battery, announces, “daddy’s home,” setting the stage for one very strange connection. The show also includes the forty-two-second Mystery of the Seeing Hand and Sphere, a surreal short film that encompasses Lynch’s bizarre worldview.