From 26 January MUSAC is to open the first major solo exhibition at a European institution by Californian artist Dave Muller. Artist, curator, cultural agitator, dj and record collector, Muller is highly acclaimed on the American scene, particularly for his projects at the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Whitney Biennial or SFMOMA.

The exhibition I Like Your Music I Love Your Music draws part of its title from Dave Muller's 2004 exhibition at the Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles I Like Your Music (2004). Bridging the gap between 2003/04 and today, the artist completes the cycle covered over recent years around the theme of music as a core generator of his artistic practice. The exhibition, which does not set out to provide a retrospective, but rather a project that brings together major elements of the artist's work, is structured around four spaces.

In the space leading into the show, just as in the earlier I Like Your Music, Muller approaches the themes of identity and portraiture. The walls are covered in large-format watercolours depicting the spines of lps that changed the artist's life. Delving deeper into this idea of the relationship between music and identity, the centre of the room is taken up by an X-shaped structure that provides eight walls to display as many of his most representative Top Tens. Top Tens are Dave Muller's very special portraits of himself and the people around him. He asks the subject (his gallerist, his wife, a friend...) to produce a list of his or her ten favourite lps. He then draws the spines of the ten lps to the person's exact height, thus producing a portrait that not only adheres to form, but also captures the person's cultural identity.

From this room the viewer proceeds into a space spread out over 400m2 that holds the mural installation The Beginning of the Middle, the Middle of the Midde and the End of the Middle (2005). This wall drawing was first displayed at the Lyon Biennial, later at a solo exhibition at New York's Gladstone Gallery, and is currently held by the MUSAC Collection. In it, Muller develops a chronological landscape of sorts, covering a history of music where the horizon reshapes itself and folds into the natural progression of events. Thus, the year of the atom bomb is represented as a palm tree and the emergence of pop music appears as a mirror ball on the timeline. Muller gives the idea an extra twist by weaving his own thoughts, opinions and projections into the drawing, for instance predicting the death of rock music with the emergence of retro in 2013, in the form of a desert. The drawing captures key moments in the development of pop, black music and other styles that shaped the US music scene the artist is immersed in. The installation is complemented with free-standing works from other collections, depicting lp spines, tapes or bits of paper with reviews cut out of newspapers or magazines, which together round off Muller's vision and the personal "history of music" he intends to transmit.

Dave Muller began making a name for himself in the 1990s on the San Francisco and Los Angeles art scene with his drawings, a discipline he pursued alongside his passion for music as a trumpeter, record collector and dj. Appropriating images from the world of art and music, the artist carries them into the expanded realm of drawing, deftly achieving a portrait and intra-history of sorts, built up on the basis of the elements that are closest to him. Thus, during the 1990s he focused his activity on the appropriation of images from the culture and from contemporary art, designing invitations for friends' exhibitions, drawing images taken from media like the covers of Art Forum, or exhibition posters from MOMA, Blum & Poe, the Santa Monica Art Museum... His cultural universe is thus tied in with peers such as Sam Durant, Anne Collier, Jorge Pardo or Andrea Bowers.