About the artist:

Dave Muller was born in 1964 in San Francisco, California. He received a BA in chemistry and art from the University of California at Davis in 1989 and briefly studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York from 1990 to 1991 before earning an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1993. From 1994 to 2000, Muller became known for nomadic social art events, known as Three Day Weekends. During that time, he also made watercolor announcements for exhibitions of his contemporaries as well as artists of earlier generations such as Jackson Pollock, made in 1999, and Andy Warhol, made in 2000. As DJ, curator, and artist, Muller examines with wit and irony the formation of an individual's identity through the amassing of cultural references. For his series Top Tens (2004), Muller created symbolic portraits in the form of delicately rendered acrylic paintings of album sleeve spines; the artist has since extended this practice to include books, cassettes, and CDs. - Since 2004 Muller has also poked fun at identity-definition and categorization in his acrylic star paintings of genre headings as they appear in magazines like The New Yorker, Time Out, and New York Times. Muller has also created several versions of auditory self-portraits in the form of extensive playlists broadcasted into the gallery. In 2008 Muller installed a mural of a massive timeline chronicling the evolution of rock n' roll since 1955 entitled As Below, So Above in the lobby of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; the mural is one of several works Muller has created since 2003 based on this timeline. Parallel to his works directly related to music, since 1999 Muller has engaged with pictorial renderings of landscapes (both urban and natural) and the sky (both day and night). Solo exhibitions of Muller's work have been held at Blum & Poe Gallery (1998, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2006, and 2009), St. Louis Art Museum (2001), Bard Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson (2002), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2004), and Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (2008). 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 lives and works in Los Angeles.