DAVE MULLER
Dave Muller is an American artist, DJ, and curator known for his traveling social art events, famously referred to as Three Day Weekends. Born in San Francisco, California, Muller holds BAs in chemistry and art from the University of California at Davis as well as an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, though he also studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1990 to 1991. In addition to his own works, Muller was well-regarded for the watercolor announcements he created for exhibitions featuring his contemporaries, including big names such as Jackson Pollock and Andy Warhol.
Muller's approach to his art is both witty and tinged with irony, and many of his works utilize cultural references to explore the development of individual identities. Muller's acrylic star paintings of genre headings, which have been featured in magazines such as The New Yorker, Time Out, and the New York Times approach identity definitions and categorizations in a satirical, joking manner. His series, Top Tens, created in 2004, consists of acrylic paintings of album sleeve spines, which come together to form portraits. Muller's use of unconventional materials in his work is not limited to album sleeves, and also includes books, cassettes, and CDs. Muller has also produced a number of auditory self-portraits, which exist in the form of extensive playlists that are broadcast into a gallery. His 2008 mural, As Below, So Above also garnered much public recognition; through it, Muller chronicled the evolution of rock n' roll in the form of a massive timeline, beginning in 1955. It can be viewed in the lobby of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston and is one of several works Muller has created since 2003 based upon this time period. Alongside his music-inspired pieces, Muller has also created several renderings of landscapes and the sky, many of which date back to 1999.
Solo exhibitions of Muller's work have been held at Blum & Poe Gallery, in New York; the St. Louis Art Museum, the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. His work has also been included in major group exhibitions such as Made in California: Now at the Los Angeles County Museum (2000), Lyon Biennale (2003 and 2005), Whitney Biennial (2004), and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2007). Muller currently lives and works in Los Angeles.”