Gladstone Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Dave Muller. In his installations of paintings on paper, Muller explores his ongoing relationship with the past, present, and future of music, using record collections, musical taxonomies, and set-lists as impetus for portraits and cultural critiques. With a connoisseur’s eye, he dissects and juxtaposes this graphic cultural residue with imagery of flora and fauna creating a conversation between natural topography and his musical interests.

Charting the construction of identity through these acquired cultural productions, Muller investigates the overlaps and subtle consonance that artistic taste creates between the individual and the group. In this manner a varied and elaborate self-portrait emerges from the graphics he culls from the world around him and reproduces from his own perspective.  Moving from the specificity of an expert to the ubiquity of the commonplace, the images in Muller’s installation expand and envelop the viewer into their field creating a communal portrait based upon the roving markers of tastes throughout periods and geographies. As Muller said in an interview for his recent retrospective at MUSAC, “I want my art to be as useful to me as a good piece of music, to take me somewhere new, to make me think and also make me happy.” This sense of jubilation is apparent in his installations, even as he probes deeper connections and sophisticated cultural investigations. And all are welcome to this holiday.

Dave Muller was born in 1964 in San Francisco. In 2002, his exhibition “Connections” premiered at the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies in Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, and traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. He has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the ICA, Boston, and the St. Louis Art Museum, while he has been included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial and the 2003 and 2005 Lyon Biennials. Most recently, Muller has a mid-career survey called “I Like Your Music, I Love Your Music” at the Museo de Arte Contemporanea de Castilla y Leon in Lyon, Spain. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles.