A new exhibition exploring the weird and wonderful artistic talents of US filmmaker David Lynch has opened here after a successful run in Paris. The Air Is On Fire introduces the public to the little-known artistic output of the award-winning director, looking at dozens of his paintings, sketches, photography and installations.
Lynch, who is most famous for his 1986 film Blue Velvet and his surreal TV series, Twin Peaks, started out as an artist, painting and sketching obsessively long before he considered cinema.
The exhibit, partly curated by Lynch himself, tackles his dark and fantastic creations over the course of his career, starting with sketches he produced as a teenager. Presenting the show, Lynch recalled his obsessive engagement with art as a young man, scribbling pictures on any paper he could lay his hands on, ''from matchboxes to paper serviettes''.
These sketches, which Lynch says he still turns to for inspiration, line the exhibit walls, showing a more intimate side to the filmmaker. At the age of 19, he started studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, producing an array of paintings as well as a large number of photographs.
He famously moved on to making short abstract films, which he calls 'moving paintings', after seeing a canvas in his studio moved unexpectedly by the breeze.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Lynch's art displays the same fascination with the dark, disturbing side of life that characterizes his films. Huge paintings show people with splayed or dissected body parts and implied and explicit violence is routine. His Distorted Nudes series features Victorian erotic photographs digitally manipulated into strange, brutal shapes, while a number of his works explore the idea of home, a dark place with sinister shapes. In addition to Lynch's static art, the exhibit also displays several of his installations and early short films, including The Alphabet, The Amputee and The Grandmother.
Born in Montana in 1946, Lynch has received Academy Award nominations for best director three times: for The Elephant Man (1980), Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive (2001).
His 1990 movie, Wild at Heart, won the coveted Palme d'Or at that year's Cannes Film Festival, while the 2006 edition of the Venice Film Festival awarded him a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement.
The Air Is On Fire, part of the Milan Triennial festival, runs until January 13.
