Dave Muller (b. 1964, San Francisco) is an Los Angeles – based artist whose multifaceted practice spans painting, drawing, watercolor, and social sculpture. He received a BA from the University of California at Davis in 1989, where he also served as a DJ and Music Director at KDVS. He briefly studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York before earning an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia in 1993.

Integral to Muller’s emergence as an artist in the 1990s was his formation of Three Day Weekend, a series of nomadic social art events held over holiday weekends that began in Los Angeles and expanded to major cities globally. At once exhibition platform, party, and conceptual project, Three Day Weekend provided vital opportunities for young artists while modeling an alternative, community-driven approach to art-making - especially resonant in the disconnected sprawl of Los Angeles. Simultaneously, Muller began creating watercolor announcements for these events and for exhibitions featuring his contemporaries, a practice that later extended to canonical artists, designers, and major institutions. In a 2001 Artforum feature, Ralph Rugoff wrote that the project “raises questions about the complex relationship between artmaking and generosity,” noting that Muller’s work, “laced with sly reversals and slippery humor,” engages “the myriad ways in which artistic identity is mediated by the rhetoric of publicity.”

Muller’s studio practice is equally distinctive. While his appropriated imagery may at first appear as homage or mimicry, his hand-rendered watercolors, drawings, and paintings, characterized by rich, uneven washes of color, serpentine lines, and deliberate imperfection, offer a deeply personal counterpoint to the slickness of digital reproduction. Over more than three decades, his continued embrace of analog, DIY methods stands as a quiet but powerful reminder of the enduring value of the artist’s hand, particularly amid accelerating image technologies and the rise of AI.

Muller’s work has been presented widely in the United States and internationally. He has had solo exhibitions at Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, Spain, among others. Important group exhibitions include the 2004 Whitney Biennial and Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2007). His work is represented in the public collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.