Although he showed several times with a local Los Angeles gallery, Kayne Griffin Corcoran, painting and printmaking played second fiddle in his career to filmmaking. However, his status as an artist changed in 2022 when his LA gallery merged with the international mega gallery, Pace, which sells work by upmarket artists such as Mark Rothko, Barbara Hepworth, Jean Dubuffet and Agnes Martin.
To date, no art by Lynch has sold for more than $20,000 at auction, though some of his belongings were sold after his death for $4.25m (£3.15m). One of his coffee machines, estimated at $2,000, sold for $45,000, and a signed copy of his script for the neo-noir horror film, Lost Highway, also estimated at $2,000, sold for $195,000.
A new exhibition staged by Pace in Berlin opens on January 29, where many previously unseen artworks will be priced from $22,000 to $275,000. The most expensive is a faux-naïf painting of a boy (over six-feet square) in a stripey t-shirt, holding up a magnifying glass to a blasted tree where a girl sits on a branch screaming while a doll hangs from the branch with a rope around its neck. A childlike script reminiscent of early Lucian Freud or David Hockney reads: “Billy (and his friends) did find Sally in the tree.”
What does it mean? Characteristically, Lynch would never say.
