Jose Dávila

Jose Dávila (B. 1974, Guadalajara, Mexico) creates sculptural installations, photographic works and paintings that simultaneously emulate, critique, and pay homage to 20th century avant-garde art and architecture. Throughout his artistic career, Dávila’s practice has explored spatial occupation and the transitory nature of physical structures. Referencing artists and architects from Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz to Josef Albers and Donald Judd, Dávila’s work investigates the expanded possibilities of the modernist movement through its translation, appropriation, and reinvention.

Dávila is widely celebrated for his sculpture and public installation practice. In his sculptures, Dávila employs industrial and quotidian materials to make simultaneously humorous and critical reference to Modernist masterworks of art and design. In these works, materials are held in semiotic and structural tension – balanced both between high and low culture, and between permanence and collapse. Employing gravity and chance as materials, Dávila’s carefully arranged, and precariously balanced works expand the conventions of historical forms, and test the limits of the medium of sculpture.