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Art

8 Artists to Follow If You Like David Lynch

Alina Cohen
Jan 28, 2025 8:41PM

David Lynch, still from Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, 1992. © New Line Cinema. Courtesy of New Line Cinema/Photofest.

Since the death of David Lynch on January 15th, the internet has been flooded with an outpouring of remembrances for the artist and filmmaker. These confirmed what fans already knew: Lynch was an American original whose quirky characters, distinct visual style, and strong sense of place led viewers to see their own worlds anew. He took on the most conventional of storylines—the police procedural (Twin Peaks), the actress trying to make it in Hollywood (Mulholland Drive), lovers on the run (Wild at Heart)—and made them strange and novel once again. Altogether, his works form a world of their own, full of themes, faces, visual motifs that cycle from one project to the next.

Lynch began his career as a painter and continued to paint and sculpt throughout his life. This body of work, too, was full of darkness, humor, and stories that never quite resolved. In 2022, the artist mounted his final exhibitions at Sperone Westwater (watercolors with a refined palette of blacks, grays, and reds) and Pace Gallery (mixed-media paintings and lamps).

It’s an enormous loss to know that we’ll never get a new Lynch project again. But his legacy will live on in the myriad artists he’s influenced. Below are a few who cultivate their own sense of Lynchian weirdness across various media.


Alexandre Singh

B. 1980, Bordeaux, France. Lives and works in New York.

Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, still from Deux personnes échangeant de la salive, 2024. Courtesy of the artists.

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Narrative is at the heart of Alexandre Singh’s multidisciplinary practice. The artist’s output has ranged from a play featuring the sculptor Charles Ray as an Apollonian ideal to an installation of various household objects that “talk” to each other from atop plinths. Singh generates dramas between humans, gods, and things, imbuing his presentations with an air of the carnivalesque.

In 2019, the artist mounted his solo exhibition “A Gothic Tale” at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. The installation featured a black-and-white checkered floor and draping red curtains—evocative of the “Red Room” in Twin Peaks, a highly stylized limbo in which the living and dead can meet. Singh’s work can suggest relics of the future. Like Lynch, the artist considers where humanity might be headed.

In a newer film, Deux personnes échangeant de la salive (Two People Exchanging Saliva) (2024), Singh and his partner Natalie Musteata created a black-and-white world in which kissing is banned. The film takes inspiration from the aesthetics of film noir, which also influenced Lynch. The genre allows for simultaneous darkness and deadpan humor: a winning combination for anyone interested in exploring contemporary life.


Tony Oursler

B. 1957, New York. Lives and works in New York.

Tony Oursler’s fantastical films and installations straddle psychedelia and camp. The artist gained renown for his video dolls: sculptures with projections showing the visages of actors and musicians who blink, emote, and perform. Oursler’s interests range from psychology to myth, and his work is both otherworldly and deeply grounded in contemporary thought and dysfunction. Surveillance, mermaids, and multiple personality disorder are all of concern to the artist.

Lynch became associated with a group of actors he worked with again and again, including Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, and Jack Nance; Oursler, similarly, is linked with a close creative network. His collaborators have included visual artists Tony Conrad and Dan Graham as well as musicians Kim Gordon and David Bowie (also a Lynch collaborator), for whom he designed video sets. Oursler has explicitly cited Lynch’s 1977 film Eraserhead as an influence, and both use deformed figures and an aesthetic that evokes the distortions and emotionality of German Expressionism. The two artists’ spiritual link is evident in their work across video and sculpture and shared ability to transcend the boundaries of their media.


Mary Reid Kelley

B. 1979, Greenville, South Carolina. Lives and works in Olivebridge, New York.

Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley, still from You Make Me Iliad, 2010. Courtesy of the artists and Pilar Corrias, London.

Mary Reid Kelley’s videos are defined by their erudite dialogue and a distinct visual style: Performers wear bulging eyes, and their bodies are painted in thick black outlines that make them look like animations or cartoons. Often working with her partner, Patrick Kelley, the artist films in black and white, alluding to the past and paring down her time-based medium as though attempting to reduce its dimensionality.

Kelley’s films include You Make Me Iliad (2010), The Syphilis of Sisyphus (2011), and Blood Moon (2021). Women’s roles are a frequent theme, though the artist’s sources range from Greek mythology and French philosophy to histories of World War I and John Steinbeck’s 1937 novel Of Mice and Men. Kelley also makes prints and watercolors that riff on her films’ characters and ideas.

Like Lynch’s work, Kelley’s films embrace a kind of dream logic. Their characters use off-kilter, antiquated language, often speaking in verse and rhyme. These speech patterns suggest an otherworldliness, though the sentiments expressed remain very much of our world.


Nicola Tyson

B. 1960, London. Lives and works in New York.

Twins appear across Nicola Tyson’s newest body of paintings, echoing the uncanny doubling that recurs in Lynch’s filmography. Currently on view at Petzel Gallery in New York, Tyson’s acrylic compositions feature bodies that merge or are mirrored by another form—a tree, for example, or a teapot. Figures’ hollowed eyes and a saturated palette further lend the works a sense of unreality, while the artist’s dry brush technique amplifies their flatness. Apertures abound in Tyson’s paintings, where assholes and eyes look more or less the same. All these entry points into the figures suggest a liberated attitude towards sexuality.

Tyson has worked in film, photography, and performance, as well as writing. In 1978, she documented London’s underground club scene in a series of photos of the “Bowie Nights” at Billy’s Club in Soho. If David Bowie didn’t himself appear, he was the patron saint of these events: an emblem of creative freedom and unfettered approaches to gender and sexuality. Tyson (and Lynch, and Oursler) have all infused that spirit into their own work.


Kaari Upson

B. 1970, San Bernardino, California. D. 2021, New York.

Kaari Upson, installation view of “Kaari Upson: Good Thing You Are Not Alone” at the New Museum, New York, 2017. Photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio. Courtesy of the New Museum.

Kaari Upson’s sculptures, videos, and installations conjure the mundane and macabre elements of American domestic life. The artist cast household furniture and accoutrements, like sofas and paper towel rolls, placing them around her exhibitions like actors in a play. The sculptures’ surfaces are often dingy, their worn appearances suggesting economic constraint and overuse. For her 2017 retrospective at the New Museum, the artist installed giant shelves filled with the distinctive orange books from the “Idiot’s Guide” series and dozens of life-sized dolls made to look like her mother. The arrangement resembled a very unusual big-box store, simultaneously dehumanizing and focused on self-improvement.

Two empty homes inspired much of Upson’s work: an abandoned house in her childhood neighborhood in San Bernardino, and a tract house in Las Vegas. The former inspired a large body of work in which Upson invented—in drawings, paintings, and performances—the life of Larry, the house’s former inhabitant. The latter was the source of the furniture which Upson cast.

Like Lynch, Upson had plenty to say about the particular strangeness of California and the weird goings-on inside its homes. Upson herself passed away in 2021, from metastatic breast cancer. Her sweeping aesthetic vision is very missed.


Shana Moulton

B. 1976, Oakhurst, California. Lives and works in New York and Santa Barbara, California.

At the center of Shana Moulton’s video and performance art is her alter ego Cynthia, who navigates a world more bizarre than ours, yet wracked with the same anxieties. Cynthia wears dresses embedded with medical devices, seeks solace in a mobile sauna, and performs wellness rituals from exercise to bathing. Through this character, Moulton pokes fun at self-care practices, consumer culture, and her own association with both.

Lo-fi beats, fantastical film sequences, and digital animations further the surreality and New Age sensibility of Moulton’s films. In the artist’s 10-part series “Whispering Pines” (2002–present)—which she has said takes inspiration from Twin Peaks—Cynthia is often caught in dreams or reverie. The moon rises behind her, or she appears in the middle of a forest with a floating head. In this work, Moulton articulates an uneasy relationship between the body and the natural world.


Guillermo Kuitca

B. 1961, Buenos Aires. Lives and works in Buenos Aires.

Dim, eerie interiors and structures fill the canvases of Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca. Throughout his paintings and sculptures, maps and floor plans overlay abstract expanses, suggesting larger networks. In smaller-scale works on paper, iconic landmarks such as the Hollywood Bowl, Covent Garden, and the Metropolitan Opera House are fractured and abstracted. Like Lynch, Kuitca appears to be searching for the underlying patterns that govern our world.

In 2015, the artist presented a solo exhibition,“Les Habitants,” at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, which paid homage to Lynch’s 2007 show at the same venue, titled“The Air is on Fire.” Kuitca designed a blood-red interior with walls featuring his signature Cubist patterning. Lynch’s paintings were displayed, along with video documentation of a 2011 concert performance by Lynch and Patti Smith. Kuitca, deploying a Lynchian sensibility, considers the relationship between dreaming and logic. At the Fondation Cartier, he created a pseudo-domestic space where his works and Lynch’s could engage in surreal dialogue.


Jeremy Olson

B. 1976, Ojai, California. Lives and works in New York.

Jeremy Olson conjures a new universe in creature-like lamps and paintings of science-fictional interiors populated by invented species. The artist’s futuristic scenes can evoke the sets of Lynch’s Dune, with its gargantuan spaceships and beings that are humanoid yet alien. The artist’s newer resin sculptures resemble claws adorned with miniature theme park rides or playground structures. Across multiple dimensions, Olson considers the unique textures and lives of his organisms.

As Olson hops from one medium to the next, he invents a cohesive, surrealistic world without being bound by a single, linear narrative. It’s up to the viewers to create their own stories, informed by their unique ideas about what novelties the next centuries or millennia may hold.

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Alina Cohen