David Lynch’s cinematic spectres persist, haunting contemporary art. His stroboscopic visions, dreamscapes that oscillate between clarity and blur, reveal a sublime uneasiness that reflects the anxieties of everyday life. The blurry images of dream and reality create an unsettling dissonance, mirroring the ephemeral nature of contemporary life. These images compose fragments of subconscious reality, existing in the liminal space between fantasy and waking. Lynch’s art transcends mere imagination, tangibly exploring the subconscious, creating a journey into the dark corners of the human psyche.
The tension between splendour and decay, the sublime and the grotesque, is a Lynchian signature, a testament to the enduring power of his singular vision. David Lynch’s cinematic universe, from the flickering lights of Twin Peaks (1990-91 & 2017) to the haunting landscapes of Mulholland Drive (2001), is a phantasmagorical journey into the subconscious, where the familiar is distorted and the uncanny takes over. His masterful use of light and shadow, his exploration of the uncanny fusion of dream and reality, have indelibly shaped generations of artists and filmmakers.
Nicolas Bourriaud’s Retour sur Mulholland Drive (2017) exhibition exemplifies this influence, showcasing artworks by several artists who have been inspired by Lynch’s aesthetic and have been able to playfully engage with cultural codes using reduced means of expression. Taking Lynch’s 2001 cult film as a starting point, the exhibition created a shared imaginary space, a community forged by narratives and myths. Like Lynch, these artists appropriated the codes of mass consumption, experimenting with the analytical spirit of a critic while simultaneously evoking powerful emotions.
The exhibition showcased works that explore the enigmatic potential of the banal, revealing social and cultural tensions alongside intuitive sensory impressions. Bourriaud has called this approach “Minimalism Fantastic”, generating an “unsettling strangeness”, a disturbing but ephemeral value in minimalist forms. The exhibition’s exploration of seemingly smooth or grotesque elements revealed intuitive sensory impressions, sometimes dormant beneath the surface. While Bourriaud’s book “Minimal Fantasy” (2017) further demonstrates how David Lynch’s aesthetics connects across generations of visual artists, weaving a common thread through disparate creative expressions.
Let’s have a look at not only the works of some of the artists involved in Nicolas Bourriaud’s 2017 project, but also the artistic practice of a new generation of artists who, consciously or not, share their perspective on art with David Lynch.
Maria Loboda
In the artwork Hearing the Omniabsence (2019), a deceptive veil of artificial snow gives way to the revelation of a sound system, the frozen heart of technology. The paradoxical title of Maria Loboda’s (b. 1979) work, a whispered oxymoron, transcends linguistic boundaries, projecting emotional states beyond the comprehension of words. A once-desirable stereo system, now a muted relic, embodies the impossibility of omnipresence, a poignant metaphor for the fleeting nature of eternity. This work invites a deeper engagement with inherent ambiguity, transforming the viewer into an active participant in the unfolding narrative.
Loboda’s archaeological lens reveals how historical contexts and the circulation of commodities shape our perceptions, turning galleries into layered excavations of meaning. Her multilayered installations are temporal landscapes in which meanings are refracted through the viewer’s gaze, a fluid exchange between historical attributions and contemporary interpretations. Objects, once fixed in time, embark on a journey from transmission to encounter, their stories whispered across the centuries. Through the deconstruction and reorganisation of familiar forms and symbols appropriated from everyday life, Loboda creates a unique voice in contemporary archaeology, where interior spaces are spatially distorted, bearing the marks of abandonment and decay.
In Maria Loboda’s work, installations, environments and sculptures become palimpsests of meaning, meticulously crafted experiments with meanings encoded in the surrounding objects. Born in Kraków, Poland, but Germany-based, as a trans-historical archaeologist of the everyday, she intercepts objects, extracting their new potential from anachronistic juxtapositions with their surroundings. Drawing on the immediate, her works engage in critical dialogue with the history of visual culture, subtly questioning structures of power.
Klára Hosnedlová
Klára Hosnedlová’s (b. 1990) immersive installations transport viewers into captivating, expansive, oversized environments, creating a unique dialogue between historical reflection and speculation about post-natural futures. Drawing inspiration from Central European modernism and contemporary design, as well as the Brutalist architecture of the 1960s and 1970s, this Czech artist’s work seamlessly combines architectural elements with performance, sculptural forms, and intricately woven embroidery. Often rooted in Central and Eastern European history and mythology, Hosnedlová stages site-specific performances, collaborating with performance artists and employing a cinematic language to design settings and characters within her meticulously crafted environments and sculptures.
In post-industrial exhibition spaces, the audience becomes an active participant, their presence animating a nostalgic narrative that examines possible narratives about the past and the future. Objects and faces are transformed into landscapes of light and shadow, framed by sculptural structures made from found materials, often imprinted with appropriated photographs integrated into biomorphic, archaic and geological forms. Hosnedlová embraces nostalgia as a fundamental aspect of global culture, exploring the complex interplay between reflection and desire, alienation and emotion.
Her monumental installation Embrace, which opened in May 2025 at the Hamburger Bahnhof – Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart in Berlin, exemplifies this approach. Transforming a historical hall within the industrial architecture of the museum, she has created a utopian landscape using nine-meter-long tapestries, site-specific objects, organic reliefs and large embroideries, creating a truly majestic and immersive experience. Hosnedlová’s work invites viewers to actively participate in the creation of meaning, blurring the boundaries between past and future, memory and imagination, reality and dream.
Marlie Mul
Marlie Mul’s (b. 1980) artistic oeuvre is a fluid and ever-evolving landscape where sculptural experimentation, painting and printmaking converge. She explores the ephemeral and the virtual, exploring the mechanisms of representation and media circulation. Fluidity, ephemerality and dripping become central motifs, manifesting in sinuous silicone sculptures adorned with synthetic hair, in reproductions of puddles and investigations of post-industrial history.
The Dutch artist balances meticulous craftsmanship with artificial elements, creating a compelling tension between precision and organic form. Puddle series (2012-2016) captures fleeting urban scenes in resin, stone, and sand, their black, shiny surfaces imprinted with road debris, testifying to the ephemeral nature of urban life. This theme of fluidity metaphorically extends throughout her work, a continuous flow of ideas and forms.
Her co-founded fanzine, Ground, and the publication Cancelled (2018), following the enigmatic cancellation of her exhibition at GOMA in Glasgow, became a powerful statement of institutional critique, transforming a setback into an archive of resistance. Moreover, her nomadic platform, Hermany, challenges traditional institutional spaces, moving beyond content, media and place. Marlie Mul’s work is expressed in dynamic experiments with materiality and representation, in which she does not hesitate to spontaneously mine spaces of dialogue between the physical and the virtual, the artisanal and the mass-produced, the personal and the political.
Anna Sztwiertnia
Anna Sztwiertnia (b. 1993) creates site-specific sculptures and installations that explore the potential of spiritual practices, unconventional medicine, and sanatorium culture, reinterpreting rituals through the prism Iof contemporaneity. Often exhibited outside of conventional exhibition spaces, her works engage visitors directly in their architectural context. Using flexible forms in metal and stone, or by crafting a lastryko fountain, the Polish artist creates immersive experiences that stimulate multiple senses.
Hydrofornia (2024), for example, symbolically highlights the healing properties of water, referencing hydrotherapy traditions. The installation’s form and name evoke a water-pressure mechanism, yet its design recalls sanatorium equipment, suggesting spa treatments. This juxtaposition of industrial severity and natural subtlety emphasises the tension between the technological and the organic, exploring the therapeutic potential of water.
In another project, Sztwiertnia transformed part of an exhibition space inside Bunker Sztuki in 2019 into an underground labyrinth. Through a carefully orchestrated interplay of objects, video, sound, dim light, and heat, she leads the viewer on a journey from sensual perception to transcendental experience. Mixing motifs from Christian rituals, spa treatments and rave culture, she creates an artistic trance ritual that pushes the boundaries of everyday life.
Jósefina Alanko
In one of her works titled Ghost(s) No. 1 from 2024, Finnish artist Jósefina Alanko (b. 1993) explores Finnish folk myths and the potential of mythology as a “folk demon”. Using fabrics, pigments and raw linen, Alanko creates post-media reinterpretations of traditional painting, juxtaposing natural textile materials and suspended convex forms, systematically transforming these materials into abstract forms inspired by the matriarchal roots of Finnish Karelian culture.
This “anatomy of the spirit”, as she calls it, reflects a rich mosaic of personal experiences, testimonies of female experiences alongside queer visions of beauty, traditional cosmologies alongside scientific perspectives on the environment or genetics. In her work Blue Moth (2024), she intertwines Japanese demons, Slavic household spirits, and benevolent pagan entities to create a living embroidered narrative of contemporary life in Finland. In the Karelian tradition of Alanko, the presence of spirits is not a secret, but a widely recognised part of everyday life, an energy felt in the glow of a bonfire or the heat of a sauna: a legacy of spiritual awareness passed down from generation to generation.
Natalia Januła
Natalia Januła’s performative practice, rooted in speculative narratives, explores the blurred boundaries between urban and natural environments, functionality and ritual, and the complex position of bodies within synthetic worlds. Her work employs a wide range of media and technologies – video, installation, CGI, performance, sculpture, kinetics, and sound – to create a unique artistic language. The artist constructs sculptural assemblages, combining natural elements with their artificial counterparts.
The Polish-born, London-based artist’s material palette includes plastic, silicone, latex, and plaster prints, experimenting also in juxtaposing ceramics and found objects. Reused, remelted and reworked materials – parts of discarded electronic devices, rusted tools and everyday household objects – become integral components of her artistic vision. Her process includes extrusion, solid casting design, rubber mould making, stamping and replication, pushing the boundaries of materiality in the contemporary digital realm through CGI.
Natalia’s “Cabinets of Curiosity”, like the cinema of David Lynch, evoke a compelling tension between comfort and discomfort, desire and revulsion, often peppered with unsettling humour. The artist challenges human exceptionalism, imagining a world where humans and nonhumans coexist without hierarchy. In her oeuvre, she deconstructs human domination, inviting the viewer to imagine alternative existences where survival is not determined by power but by adaptability.
Descending into Janula’s exhibition space is like entering a liminal realm where human domination gradually gives way to new entities and poetics. The artist presents bodies and labour, exploring the subtle shaping of matter through economies of intangible forces such as affects. Her installations, such as I think we have met before (2025), seamlessly integrate objects, queer bodies, interspecies and elements of the natural world, all within a technological context. This work explores a posthuman decline, suggesting that survival is not the privilege of those who dominate but rather of those who adapt and transform.
Agnieszka Szostek
Agnieszka Szostek’s (b. 1982) work is realised through the hybridisation of forms, combining the digital world with the organic, sometimes imprinted on the skin, although the artist does not hesitate to work with various types of recovered textile scraps. Her work actively blurs the boundaries between the artificial and the natural, creating a space in which these seemingly opposing forces converge and intertwine. This practice explores the shifting definitions of reality in a world mediated by technology.
Her collages, often imprinted on skin-like materials, depict sculptural entities in states of transformation, evoking the formation and dissolution of identity. The sculptural entities created by the artist, captured in the process of transformation, foster a new fluid narrative. Szostek has developed an extraordinary technique to create incredibly realistic imitations of human skin. The Polish artist masterfully combines multi-layered costumes, deconstructed avant-garde shoes and elements of BDSM with primal imagery, cave paintings and animist symbols. She does not simply print or “tattoo” these skins; she cuts, sews, and embroiders them, hanging them from chains to create intricate installations that resemble a laboratory where futuristic creatures come to life. His work is tactile and visceral – sticky, wet, plasmatic – and suggests the potential for a new, postorganic life.
Szostek’s aesthetic points to a posthuman, postcorporeal world, where technology and the organic world intertwine to create new forms of existence. Traditional binaries dissolve, and identities become fluid, undefined, and ever-evolving.
