The City of AbsurdityLynch Night
Exhibition Catalogue

Lost in Darkness and Confusion: Lynch Night
   Paintings, Drawings & Photographs

"Inspiration is like a piece of fuzz - it kind of comes up and makes a desire and an image that causes me to want to paint it. Or I can be going along and see an old Band-Aid in the street, and you know how an old Band-Aid is. It's got some dirt around the edges and the rubber part has formed some black little balls. and you see the stain of a little and maybe some yellow dirt on it, a little ointment. It's in the gutter next to some dirt and a rock, and maybe a little twig. If you were to see a photo-graph of that not knowing what it was, it would be unbelievably beautiful."

   Paintings & Drawings

"It's one person acting and reacting with paint; it's a process that does not involve words."

"What I'm trying to do with each canvas is create a situation in which the paint can be itself, which means letting go of any rationali-zation. It's important to let ideas blossom without too much judging or interference. The beauty of children is their ability to look at the world openly, without being bound by the intellect. Your intellect can hold back so many wonderful, fantastic things. Without logic or reason, there's always something else, some-thing unseen. The world is infinite rather than finite."

"One of the reasons I prefer painting in black and white, or almost in black and white, is that if you have some shadow or darkness in the frame, then your mind can travel in there and dream. In general, color is a little too real. It's too close. It doesn't make you dream much. If everything is visible, and there's too much light, the thing is what it is, but it isn't any more than that."

"I hate slick and pretty things. I prefer mistakes and accidents. Which is why I like things like cuts and bruises - they're like little flowers. I've always said that if you have a name for something, like 'cut' or 'bruise,' people will automatically be disturbed by it. But when you see the same thing in nature, and you don't know what it is, it can be very beautiful."

A Man with Ointment
1993, 42" x 48"

Antenna with Figure
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Antenna with Figure #2
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Ant is, Ants are Somewhere
1993, 42" x 48"

Blind Man's Experiment
1996, 162,6 x 223,5 cm

Boise, Idaho
1989, 163 x 223 cm

Box of Bees
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Bug Yell
1993, 42" x 48"

Bunch #1
1995, 55,88 x 76,2 cm

Bunch #4
1995, 55,88 x 76,2 cm

Bunch #5
1995, 55,88 x 76,2 cm

Bunch #6
1995, 55,88 x 76,2 cm

Bunch #7
1995, 55,88 x 76,2 cm

Bunch #8
1995, 55,88 x 76,2 cm

Dark Shapes Behind a Veil
1987, 145 x 99 cm

Dog and Child near my House
1996, 167,6 x 167,6 cm

Dr. Howl's Philosophy
1996, 167,6 x 167,6 cm

Egg of Words
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime
1993, 48" x 78"

Heaven Plheng Hell
1988-90, 15,24 x 10,16 cm

Hey Ho
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Hot
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Leaking
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Memory of a Head
1994, 40" x 40"

Mysterious Forest
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Nihilistic Delusion
1994, 40" x 40"

On a Windy Night a Lonely Figure Walks to Jumbo Klown's Room
1988, 167 x 167 cm

One Two Three Four
1993, 42" x 48"

Opening in Forest
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Pop this one Fuck
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Rat Meat Bird
1996, 127 x 162,4 cm

Rock with Seven Eyes
1996, 127 x 152,4 cm

Smoking Shapes #2
1987, 145 x 99 cm

Soft Eclipse
1988-90, 15,24 x 10,16 cm

Stage of Smoke and Wires
1988-90, 25,4 x 17,78 cm

Stage with two Figures Dancing
1988-90, 25,4 x 15,24 cm

The Garden
1969

Trapeze #2
1988-90, 25,4 x 17,8 cm

Three Figures on a Stage
1987, 54 x 74 cm

Trees at Night
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Yeah And She Had Red Lips Too
1989, 163 x 223 cm

Words at Night
1988-90, 20,32 x 15,24 cm

Wounded Man as a Tree Creating Bugs
1996, 167,6 x 167,6 cm

   Photographs

"Well...if you said to me, 'Okay, we're either going down to Disneyland or we're going to see this abandoned factory,' there would be no choice. I'd be down there at the factory. I don't really know why. It just seems like such a great place to set a story"

"I love industry. Pipes. I love fluid and smoke. I love man-made things. I like to see people hard at work, and I like to see sludge and man-made waste"

Nudes and Smoke
color: 6, b/w 6

Industrial
big: 9, small: 16

Postmodern Mood Structures
7

Organic Phenomena
Man with Instrument 3
Spineless Chicken Shit
untitled

Fish Kit

Bee Board

Clayhead with Cheese, Turkey and Ants
1991
"I had ants in my kitchen, and they are little, small what they call I think sugar ants, but they are coming in I think for water. I made a small head of cheese and turkey. I put a ball of cheese and turkey together and then cased it with clay, and mounted it on a small coat hanger. I made an opening in the mouth, I exposed some turkey in the eye and in the ears. Now the ants found the coat hanger, began climbing in for four days and nights non-stop and emptied the entire head of turkey and cheese."

   Other

Furniture
Coffee Table
Espresso Table
Floating Beam Table
Steel Block Table

"To my mind, most tables are too big and they're too high. They shrink the size of the room and eat into space and cause unpleasant mental activity."

"I don't want to appear like some all-round talent. Not at all. I just inevitably get involved with different things. I started out being a painter. And like many painters I was looking for a new challenge. Because it is not easy to make money with art. After all, just to build canvas stretchers, and stretch a canvas you get involved with a lot of tools. And one thing always leads to another: Pretty soon I was building things.
It's a special outlook. You build your own world. And, in my case, my father always had a workshop in the house and I was taught how to use tools and spent a lot of time in the shop building things, so it all started at a young age."

The Angriest Dog in the World
Comic Strip, LA Reader: 8

"The memory of the anger is what does 'The Angriest Dog.' Not the actual anger anymore. It's sort of a bitter attitude toward life."

"Yes, it is perverse because the humor in the strip is based on the sickness of people's pitiful state of unhappiness and misery. But it thrills me."

Film Stills
Fire Walk With Me
Eraserhead


LynchNight | back to events | David Lynch main page
© Mike Hartmann
mhartman@mail.uni-freiburg.de