Jose Dávila

Jose Dávila’s work originates in the symbolic languages that operate within art history and Western visual culture. He reconfigures these pictorial, graphic, and sculptural languages through contradictory and contrasting relationships, pushing the correspondence between form and content to its limits. The artist articulates these oppositions from different perspectives: through associations between images and words; through structural arrangements of materials that suggest either harmonious balance or disarray; and through indirect spatial strategies that define architectural space and the presence of objects. Dávila’s multidisciplinary practice presents a series of material and visual aporias. These paradoxes allow fragility and resistance, rest and tension, geometric order and unpredictable chaos to coexist. His sculptural work is grounded in the specificity of the materials he employs: their origins, symbolic meanings, and formal characteristics assume particular significance as industrial components interact with organic raw materials. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions and events including Museo Novecento, Florence; Gropius Bau, Berlin; Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Los Angeles; Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Marfa Contemporary, Marfa; Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah; Kunstmuseum Den Haag; Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar; Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City; CaixaForum Madrid; MoMA PS1, New York; KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the San Diego Museum of Art; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; MAK—Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna; Museo Jumex, Mexico City; The Bass, Miami Beach; and Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo, among others. Dávila’s work is held in major international public and private collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Instituto Inhotim, Brumadinho; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Dávila received the BALTIC Artists’ Award in 2017 and was named an Artist Honoree by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, in 2016. He has also received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts and Mexico’s Sistema Nacional de Creadores de Arte. In 2020, Dávila presented the solo exhibition Directional Energies, curated by Pedro Alonzo, at Dallas Contemporary and participated in NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney. In 2021, his solo exhibition Le pietre sanno aspettare, curated by Guido Magnaguagno, inaugurated the Centro Internazionale di Scultura in Peccia, Switzerland. The artist lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico.