The cult movie directors coming to a gallery near you

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories

The art world has gone bananas for David Lynch of late. Over the past decade, the Twin Peaks director and sometime painter has exhibited his art at venues all over the USA and Europe, most recently at Maastricht’s venerable Bonnefanten Museum, which is currently hosting a large scale retrospective featuring more than 500 of Lynch’s non-cinematic works (until 28 April). British fans of the enigmatic mind behind Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive will soon be able to get a taste of his extracurricular artistry when a show opens at HOME as part of the Manchester International Festival in July.

Lynch, whose first gallery exhibition took place in New York in 1989, is no newcomer to the scene: indeed, before settling on film, he studied art at the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts in Boston. ‘First of all, I only wanted to ever be a painter, but painting led into filmmaking’, he recently the New York Times. ‘So I feel like I’m a painter and a filmmaker and I’m also into music. I always say, I go where the ideas take me, and that’s sort of how it is.’

Yet the éminence grise of indie cinema isn’t the only cult director moonlighting on the art circuit. Harmony Korine, the man behind films such as Gummo and Trash Humpers, has been a prolific exhibitor in the past few years, showing anarchic bodies of work in London and New York. One show featured hundreds of VHS cassettes turned into demented abstract paintings.

Earlier this month, Korine opened ‘Young Twitchy’, an exhibition of new paintings at Gagosian’s Madison Avenue outpost. Based on photos the director (and sometime enfant terrible) took on his iPhone, the works include a host of ‘light creatures’ floating around Korine’s Florida home. ‘I would sit outside alone by the water and create alien-like friends on a low-key cosmic tropical playground’, Korine says of his working method.

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