Monday
Oct062025
David Welker 'Beast #9' Print Release Details
Monday, October 6, 2025 
Artist: David Welker
Title: Beast #9
Medium: 4 Color Risograph Print
Size: 11 x 14 Inches
Edition: 50
Prices: $55
*available at 1pm EST on Tuesday October 7th, 2025
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David Welker is a New York-based painter and illustrator celebrated for densely layered, narrative rich artwork that fuses Depression era surrealism, underground comix, surf culture and Ash-School realism into a single dreamlike vision. Born in Poughkeepsie in 1964, he studied at Syracuse University before building a gallery portfolio of large scale paintings, but his career pivoted decisively after catching Phish at Boston’s Paradise Club in 1989. A fan letter led to his 1993 oil-on-paper cover for the band’s album Rift, later voted one of the ten greatest album sleeves of all time by Relix
.
The collaboration opened the flood-gates to rock-poster commissions for Pearl Jam, The Black Keys, Primus, Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. Welker’s silk-screened gig prints hand lettered, packed with coded symbolism and pulsing colour became instant sellouts, traded feverishly on collector forums and selling out in minutes through Brooklyn’s Bottleneck Gallery, his primary print outlet.
From 2015 he shifted focus back to galleries, staging the 70-piece retrospective Subconscious Narrative at Hoerle-Guggenheim, Chelsea, and selling out booths at Art Basel, Spoke Art and Hashimoto Contemporary’s Art on Paper fair. Recent canvases still feature the same intricate linework and urban fantasy scenarios, but scale has grown; cityscapes melt into biomorphic mountains while tiny figures negotiate labyrinths of memory, music and politics.
Whether rendering a 50 inch phantasmagoric mural or a palm sized concert handbill, Welker treats every surface as a stage for his ongoing visual opera one where graffiti lettering, Rococo clouds and comic grotesques harmonise to remind viewers that reality is just another narrative waiting to be redrawn.
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