Jose Dávila

Jose Dávila is a Mexican artist whose practice spans multiple disciplines. He lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico.

 

Dávila’s work is rooted in the symbolic languages present in the history of art and Western visual culture. Through the reconfiguration of these languages into contrasting and contradictory forms and structures, he questions the relationship between form and content.

 

In his sculptural work, Dávila focuses on the materials he uses, considering their origin, symbolic value, and formal characteristics. The artist blends industrial materials with organic elements, working in a raw manner. His architectural background allows him to treat these objects as fundamental elements of drawing (point, line, and plane), creating constructions that challenge notions of balance, stability, and permanence. Through these sculptures, he seeks to make visible the physical processes and dynamics necessary for objects to maintain their shape and occupy space in a precise manner. Human intervention and the arrangement of materials create hybrid systems that respond to structural intuitions, in which the technical unfolds as a poetic dimension.

 

His work is part of both public and private international collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Inhotim Collection in Brazil, and the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, among others. He has also been featured in international publications such as Cream 3 (ed. Phaidon), 100 Latin American Artists (ed. Exit), and the monograph The Feather and The Elephant (ed. Hatje Cantz).

 

Jose Dávila has received several awards, including the Baltic Artists’ Award in 2017 in the United Kingdom and was recognized as Artist Honorée at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C. in 2016. He has received support from the Andy Warhol Foundation and the National System of Creators of the National Fund for Culture and the Arts in Mexico.