“Fragmented Landscape”

Jose Dávila's work originates from symbolic languages ​​that operate in the history of Western art and visual culture. These pictorial, graphic and sculptural languages ​​are reconfigured in contradictory and contrasting relationships, placing the correspondence between form and content at the limit.

The artist represents these oppositions from different perspectives: the association between image and word; the structural arrangements of certain materials that can lead to harmonious balance or disorder; the use of peripheral routes to define architectural space and the presence of objects. Dávila's work is essentially multidisciplinary; these material and visual aporias are realized in different ways and present paradoxes that allow the coexistence of fragility and resistance, calm and tension, geometric order and random chaos.

Jose Dávila's work uses the appropriation and recontextualization of iconic works of art to question the way we visually recognize and relate to one another; a series of translation and editing processes are carried out to alter the identification process, the materials are modified, some elements are highlighted while others are hidden, the languages ​​of certain artistic movements are also reproduced with local resources and in a contemporary context. His sculptural work starts from the specificity of the materials used, their origin, their symbolic value and their formal characteristics are elements that come into play; industrial materials interact with raw organic materials. Influenced by his training as an architect, Dávila uses objects as if they were the basic elements of drawing (point, line and plane) to create constructions that test notions of balance, stability and permanence.

With these sculptures, Dávila seeks to highlight and make visible the physical processes and dynamics necessary for things to maintain their shape and occupy space in a specific and determined way. Human intervention and the material arrangement of things produce hybrid systems that respond to structural intuitions; the technique unfolds as a poetic dimension.

His work has been exhibited at Yuz Museum, Shanghai, CN; Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX; Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, DE; Museo del Novecento, Florence, IT; Getty PST LA/LA Triennale, Los Angeles, USA; Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona, ​​SP; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, DE; Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, USA; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, USA; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, NL; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, NL; University Museum of Contemporary Art, MUAC Mexico City, MX; Caixa Forum, Madrid, SP; MoMA PS1, New York, USA; Kunstwerke Berlin, DE; San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, USA; Museo del Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, SP; MAK Vienna, AT; Jumex Foundation/Collection, Mexico City, MX; Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA; Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo, BR; among others.

His work is part of international public and private collections, such as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, US; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, FR; Museu do Centro Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, SP; Inhotim Collection, Brumadinho, BR; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, DE; among others. He has also been featured in international publications, such as Cream 3, ed. Phaidon; 100 Artists from Latin America, ed. Saia and in the monograph The Feather and The Elephant, ed. Hatje Cantz.

Jose Dávila received the 2017 Baltic Artists' Award in the UK and in 2016 was an Artist Honorée of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, USA. Dávila has received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Sistema Nacional de Criadores of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts of Mexico.