Pace Berlin to Open Posthumous David Lynch Survey at ‘Die Tankstelle’

On a gray January evening in Berlin’s Schöneberg district, the former Shell gas station on Bülowstraße is easy to miss. Bamboo and pine trees partly conceal the 1950s modernist canopy. A carp pond glints behind glass where fuel pumps once stood. Inside, in the low light of a converted garage, a small steel-and-plaster lamp by David Lynch flickers beside a grainy photograph of a derelict factory.

The filmmaker behind Twin Peaks and Blue Velvet will not attend the opening reception here on Jan. 29. Lynch died in Los Angeles on Jan. 16, 2025, at 78. But his work will fill the space in one of the first major European exhibitions mounted since his death—and one that aims to reorder how he is remembered.

A survey across media, not a film retrospective

The show, simply titled “David Lynch,” opens Jan. 29 at Pace Gallery’s Berlin outpost, Die Tankstelle, and runs through late March. Pace’s exhibition listing gives the dates as Jan. 29 to March 29, 2026. Other gallery materials and press announcements cite March 22 as the closing date; Pace has not yet publicly clarified the discrepancy.

What is clear is the ambition. Billed as a survey of Lynch’s art across media rather than a film retrospective, the exhibition gathers a selection of paintings, sculptures, watercolors, photographs, and early short films, most made between 1999 and 2022. It also serves as a prelude to what Pace describes as a “major exhibition” of Lynch’s work planned for fall 2026 at the gallery’s Los Angeles space.

“The exhibition will highlight his vision across media, bringing together a select group of paintings, sculptures, watercolors, and early short films,” Pace states in its curatorial text.

“Moving paintings” and the studio origins of Lynch’s cinema

Lynch, best known internationally as a director, often described himself differently. Though his name became synonymous with surreal, unsettling cinema, he trained as a painter and studied at schools in Washington, Boston, and Philadelphia before turning to film. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in the late 1960s, he created “Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times),” a sculptural relief onto which he projected animated figures—a piece he later called a “moving painting.”

That idea—moving images as an extension of studio work—underpins the Berlin presentation. Pace says several of Lynch’s early shorts, likely including the hand-drawn and stop-motion films he made around the same time as Six Men Getting Sick, will be screened in the gallery alongside static works.

The late paintings, the lamps, and the industrial photographs

The paintings and works on paper on view are part of a late body of work that Lynch developed in parallel with his final decades in film and television, from Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive to Twin Peaks: The Return. Executed mostly on wood or canvas, many are built up with thick layers of paint, resin, and found material. The surfaces are often scratched with phrases, names, or fragments of dialogue. Figures appear as crudely drawn silhouettes or grotesque caricatures inside houses and rooms that seem both ordinary and threatening.

French design magazine Wallpaper, previewing the show, described these works as “darkly alluring,” adding that Lynch “considered himself first and foremost a visual artist.”

Slim watercolors—in muddy grays punctuated by bright red or yellow—make up another part of the Berlin selection, some framed in rough, handmade casings that Lynch constructed himself. Arts publications that have seen images of the works note that many of these paintings and watercolors have not been publicly exhibited before.

Sculpture forms a third strand. Three of Lynch’s lamp sculptures, first shown in his 2022 Pace New York exhibition Big Bongo Night, will reappear in Berlin. Made from steel, plaster, resin, and wiring, the lamps resemble small industrial shrines. Artnet News, writing about his New York show, called them “uncanny illumination” that punctured the darkness of the gallery.

If the lamps bring a domestic scale of menace indoors, the photographic works in Berlin push outward to the industrial city. A core component of the exhibition is a set of black-and-white photographs from Lynch’s “Factory Photographs” series. Shot around 1999 in Berlin and other European industrial sites, the images show the interiors and exteriors of idle factories, smokestacks, and tangled machinery.

The Photographers’ Gallery in London, which presented the series in 2014, described the factories in those images as “cathedrals of a bygone industrial era.” In Berlin, those photographs will hang a short distance from the streets where some were taken more than two decades ago, at a time when large parts of the city were still scarred by post-Cold War deindustrialization.

A gas station turned gallery—and a reframing of legacy

The setting heightens that connection. Die Tankstelle—literally, “the gas station”—is a landmarked modernist building dating to the 1950s, originally constructed as a Shell petrol station. After stints as a private residence and then as the short-lived Kleines Grosz Museum, the site reopened in 2025 as a shared gallery operated by Pace and Galerie Judin. Today, its white canopy shelters exhibition halls that look onto a landscaped garden and pond, with a café and bookshop run by a German publishing group.

Exhibiting factory photographs and industrially inflected paintings in a repurposed gas station underlines themes that run throughout Lynch’s work: the beauty and violence of machines, the residue of heavy industry, and the instability of seemingly ordinary spaces. It also situates the show within Berlin’s broader pattern of turning former infrastructure sites into cultural venues.

Pace’s Berlin program has so far focused on cross-generational pairings and blue-chip solo shows; its opening exhibition at Die Tankstelle in 2025 featured works by Jean Dubuffet, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and contemporary painter Robert Nava. The Lynch exhibition marks the first time the space has been devoted entirely to a late 20th-century figure identified with another medium.

It also marks a new phase in managing Lynch’s legacy. After his death from cardiac arrest related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Lynch’s artworks and intellectual property passed to the David Lynch Estate, which now oversees posthumous exhibitions. The works in Berlin are credited to “© The David Lynch Estate” in Pace’s materials.

The estate has already backed at least one European museum show, “David Lynch: Up in Flames” at DOX Centre for Contemporary Art in Prague. The Berlin presentation fits into a growing pattern in which major galleries and artist estates shape how late cultural figures are historicized—deciding which works are exhibited, reproduced, and sold, and where.

Pace senior director Genevieve Day told Artnet that the Berlin show “builds on an idea Lynch was actively developing last year,” suggesting that at least some of the selection and structure follow plans the artist discussed before his death. That detail may matter to viewers wary of exhibitions entirely assembled after the fact.

What visitors can expect

For Berlin, the immediate impact is likely to be on the ground at Bülowstraße 18. The city’s tourism office already promotes Die Tankstelle as an “inner-city oasis,” and Lynch’s name is expected to draw audiences well beyond the art world: fans of Twin Peaks, students of film history, and international visitors curious to see what “Lynchian” looks like without actors or plot.

Visitors will find a compact but dense cross-section of work that connects his studio practice to his better-known films. Domestic scenes warped into nightmares, factories emptied of workers but not of tension, small lights glowing in the dark—motifs familiar from his movies reappear here in paint, plaster, and silver gelatin.

The exhibition opens with a public reception Jan. 29 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Entry to Pace Berlin is typically free during opening hours, which the gallery lists as 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday through Sunday. Given conflicting closing dates reported for the show, prospective visitors are advised to check directly with the gallery.

A year after Lynch’s death, the former gas station in Schöneberg offers a compact survey of a career that never sat neatly in one category. For years, exhibitions of his art were treated as a curious supplement to the films that made his name. In Berlin, the roles are reversed: the movies hover in the background, and what remains in front of visitors are the images, objects, and short films that fed them—the work of a visual artist who happened to change cinema.