David Lynch opens his museum exhibition in Philadelphia

He hasn’t made a feature film since the murky and phantasmagorical “Inland Empire” in 2006, but David Lynch hasn’t been idling away in obscurity.

In addition to developing online projects and proselytizing for Transcendental Meditation, the eccentric director has exhibited artwork in gallery shows in Los Angeles. The mixed-media creations were predictably Lynchian -- creepy, dream-like and often disturbing.

In perhaps the biggest display of his art to date, Lynch kicked off his first major museum exhibition in the U.S. at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.

“David Lynch: The Unified Field” opened Saturday and is scheduled to run through Jan. 11. The exhibition features 90 paintings and drawings from 1965 to the present, as well as rarely seen works from early in his career.

In the late ‘60s, Lynch was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied painting. (He has credited the city of Philadelphia for inspiring his feature film “Eraserhead.”) In the above video, Lynch tours the new exhibition and provides glimpses of his creations, some of which have been seen in L.A.

The museum exhibition will also feature a staging of Lynch’s student installation titled “Six Men Getting Sick” (1967), which brought together painting, sound and other media.

This isn’t the first time that Lynch has been feted with a major art show. The Fondation Cartier in Paris held a retrospective in 2007 of Lynch’s paintings, drawings, photographs and installations.

In 2009, Lynch sat down with The Times to talk about his career as a visual artist.

Twitter: @DavidNgLAT