Horst-Janssen Museum shows the art of US director David Lynch

“My house is on fire” (“My House Is on Fire”) is the name of the exhibition in the Oldenburg Horst-Janssen Museum. It shows work of the American David Lynch, who died in mid -January at the age of 78, parallel to the artists of the landlord Horst Janssen.

Most visitors should know the avant-garde director Lynch as a filmmaker from “Mulholland Drive” (2001) and “Blue Velvet” (1986) or the cult series “Twin Peaks” (1990/2017). He was considered a master of the absurd, absurd, strange to creepy.

It is less well known that Lynch studied painter and was also a visual artist. When he lacked sound and movement, he began to develop films from the perspective of his painting. In addition to the film, his work includes numerous paintings, drawings, print graphics, collages and even musical projects.

Although David Lynch did not know the oeuvre of the German graphic artist and draftsman Horst Janssen (1929-1995), and Janssen has also not handed over whether he has ever seen films from Lynch, the work of the two artists reveals astonishing similarities. Your visual language is a soft spot for the uncanny, stranger, ambiguous unmistakably mean, even if the look is superficially aimed at supposedly familiar.

David Lynch, who called his picturesque role models Edward Hopper, Francis Bacon and the Surrealists, did not have his first important exhibition in Germany in 2009 in the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl. The Oldenburg show “My House Is on Fire” now shows Lynch next to Janssen for the first time.

Curator Alice Gericke, herself a draftsman and scholarship holder of the Horst-Janssen Museum, combined 36 lithographs, film stills and short films by the director with etchings, drawings and photographs by Horst Janssen from the 1960s to 1980s.

Lynch’s lithographs were created in 2007 in the Paris workshop Idem (formerly Mourlot), where Picasso, Matisse and Chagall had already printed. The title, which he still had specially drawn for Oldenburg, is to be understood as a tribute to his French printing company, which provided several of his rare lithographs for the double exhibition.

The term is reminiscent of a motif that is common in Lynch: a “house that promises peace and security, but in the dark corners lurking,” said curator Alice Gericke.

Another common motive in his artistic work is the fire from which it goes out equally fascination and danger. A house in flames like on Lynch’s title -giving, large -format painting from 2017 and in his parallel short film “Fire” is the archetype of a disaster.

Horst Janssen also once referred to his home as a “Himmelsorkus” – a paradoxical, similarly ambivalent picture that combines security and hell. Janssen fabuled about domestic fireplace, which warms but can also devour cities. With drawings of matchwrits, he staged himself as a Zundelfrieder.

Both artists demonstrate in their works that behind the surfaces of the apparently healed world lurk, violence and horror lurk. No wonder that both loved the magic of color black.

Technically, however, they go different ways in printing. Janssen worked linearly and precisely, mostly on a copper plate, while Lynch acted on the smooth -cut surface of a lithostein in large gestures with deep black color and solvent. He created unreal lighting situations with intangible schemes and unclear bodies.

In German museums, lithographs by David Lynch are hardly shown and hardly collected. With his immediate work on the stone, with a brush and racle, but also with the mere fingers, Lynch produced idiosyncratic, sometimes disturbing heads, figures and motifs that have analogies to his films and short films.

Again and again it is burning houses, some arms, legs, heads, monster faces and strange animals, but also theater scenes that also spread in Lynch’s drawings and paintings. In the short film “Fire”, for example, a worm crawls out of a sun and begins to dance.

In the background you can see a drawn theater stage and a landscape in black and white, a house in flames and gripping hands. A similar scenario can also be found in Lynch’s painting “My House is on Fire” in the center of the exhibition.