Blum & Poe is pleased to announce the inaugural exhibition of its Tokyo gallery at 1-14-34 Jingumae. Dave Muller: Sublime Memory Garden will be the Los Angeles-based artist’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery and his first solo presentation in Japan.
Dave Muller’s acrylic-on-paper paintings and multimedia installations are rooted in his deep fascination with music, how it infiltrates and shapes our realities, and the communal dialogue it generates across cultures. In his characteristically loose yet deliberate painterly style, Muller depicts the iconography of his musical obsession: record sleeves, CD cases, disco balls, iPods, as well as appropriated images familiar and forgotten.
Sublime Memory Garden is a contemplative “garden” space that combines the artist’s love of music with his other favorite subject: nature. The installation begins with a timeline wall drawing that wraps around the gallery and portrays the rise and fall of rock 'n' roll as a dominant economic force in the music world. Peppered throughout the walls are framed drawings that relate to specific moments on the timeline. Spanning both sides of the gallery’s full-height windows, which afford an expansive view of the Meiji Shrine gardens, this installation is envisaged as a fertile "ground" where plants of a lush garden grow. In the middle of the gallery, several dozen drawings in Polaroid format are presented on a low table. Castaways or asides to the images on the walls, these Polaroid drawings are a kind of fertilizer for the installation as a whole.
Dave Muller was born in 1964 in San Francisco and lives and works in Los Angeles. He has had numerous exhibitions in the United States and abroad, including solo shows at the Museo de Arte Contemporánea de Castilla y León, León, Spain; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California; and St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, Missouri. Recent group exhibitions include Reverb: Music as Both Inspiration & Content in Contemporary Art, Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, California; The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl, Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; Rock-Paper-Scissors, Pop Music as Subject of Visual Art, Kunsthaus Graz, Graz, Austria; and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll since 1967, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois. His work is currently featured in Man in the Mirror, Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels, Belgium, on view until October 2017.