Solo Sculpture Trail is an open-air sculpture park featuring works and site-specific installations created in dialogue with the Matarraña landscape, with the monumental natural park of Puertos de Tortosa-Beceite as backdrop.
Originally trained as an architect, Dávila translates the fundamental principles of drawing and construction into three-dimensional space, highlighting the physical mechanisms that allow objects to sustain themselves and occupy a place in the environment. His interest in megalithic structures – including the Talayotic structures of Menorca – connects his practice with primary gestures of occupation of the territory and observation of the cosmos, underlining an essentially human dimension in the way we relate to matter.
In his work Dávila embodies artistic and architectural elements appropriated and recontextualized from iconic artists throughout history, and by so doing he reflects on the definition of conceptual art namely that it is the content and not the form what gives importance and meaning to a work of art. Through his practice, Dávila investigates aspects such as space, volume, balance and materiality, which are all an example of physical force, creating works whose shape is in constant conversation with art history.
Known for his works that explore precarious balance, Jose Dávila materializes universal forces of nature and physical phenomena such as gravity and equilibrium. By creating unexpected encounters between materials—concrete, marble, wood, glass, stone—where human intervention appears through straps holding his installations together, the artist explores the dichotomies of nature and humanity, solidity and fragility, stability and uncertainty, reality and imagination, permanence and impermanence over time.
The exhibition’s title, Las piedras saben dormir (Stones Know How to Sleep) thus resonates as a poetic metaphor for quiet resignation to the greater, universal forces of the natural world.
Physics of Uncertainty examines the ways in which material forces interact with one another, exploring the tension between stability and collapse. The work focuses on the subtle dynamics of balance, gravity, and fragility—forces that resist predictability and control. At the core of this exhibition is an ongoing investigation into the structural principles that underpin both physical reality and metaphor. Gravity, while a fundamental force, also serves as a symbol of tension and limits, framing the exploration of human vulnerability and impermanence.
Almine Rech Paris, Turenne is pleased to present ‘Half Empty, Half Full,’ Jose Dávila’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.
The artist’s titles are enigmatic and sometimes tinged with humor, already invoking the polysemy that is inseparable from reality with its inherent contradictions. This exhibition is about measure, with its title, ‘Half Empty, Half Full,’ embodying an irresolvable statement making it possible for two opposites to coexist.
Material density, gravity, and time are central to most of Jose Dávila’s practice. Known for sculptures that explore different balances created by opposing forces, Dávila has created a work for Desert X 2025 that spans both space and time. The marble blocks used in this piece are unaltered extractions from a quarry a few hundred miles across the U.S.–Mexico border.
This exhibition, Dávila’s first full-scale exhibition in a Japanese museum, will feature a painting and prints from Albers’ Homage to the Square, alongside works by Dávila based on this series. The exhibition will show Albers’ exploration of form and color, which has fascinated people throughout the ages as well as Dávila’s challenge to create new art through conversation with the art history.
For his body of work, The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation, showcased here on occasion of the artist’s solo show, Jose Dávila has drawn on the definition of circularity he came across with in the dictionary.
For Casa Wabi Dávila has created works that are more settled, stable, and centered than his characteristic heavy objects suspended in the void.
Sean Kelly is delighted to announce Photographic Memory, Jose Dávila’s first exhibition at the Los Angeles gallery. Photographic Memory is comprised of a series of Dávila’s signature cut-out works, which reference Richard Prince’s solo exhibition at LACMA in 2018.
Nara Roesler is pleased to present A pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king, the first solo exhibition by Mexican artist Jose Dávila in Brazil.
König Seoul is pleased to present Men catching birds, a new exhibition by Jose Dávila featuring two sculptural pieces and ten two-dimensional works. The latter draw from two different bodies of work that the artist has been working on for several years now – his cut-outs series and the series of paintings The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation – and each connects in their own way to the wide and unique range of influences that inform the artist’s practice. These wall-hanging works synergize with the two sculptural installations, both untitled, which together build a complex and tensile investigation of space.
Jose Dávila is interested in space and mass, in mathematical laws and physical phenomena. Thus, his oeuvre characteristically plays with gravity and apparent weightlessness, with statics and dynamics, forces of tension and compression, and those precarious moments before something collapses.
OMR is pleased to present Grava Suelta [Loose Gravel], Jose Dávila’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery, where under a new body of work, the artist brings together ideas that have been circulating in his work for the last few years: form, memory, desire, liberation, registration, doubt and discovery.
Conceived by curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath as a “manifesto of fragility”, the Biennale positions fragility at the heart of a generative form of resistance that is emboldened by the past, responsive to the present, and primed for the future.
Galleri Nicolai Wallner is pleased to present The fact of constantly returning to the same point or situation, a solo exhibition with Jose Dávila.
Museum Haus Konstruktiv is dedicating a comprehensive solo exhibition to Mexican artist Jose Dávila. Alongside selected new paintings, a multitude of sculptural works are presented, which Dávila combines to produce surprising ensembles of works while conscientiously engaging with the museum’s architectural givens.
Kewenig is delighted to present the first exhibition of Jose Dávila with the gallery in our Palma space. Entitled ‘Fuerzas Opuestas’, Dávila’s monumental installation was conceived especially for the oratory, building a dialogue between his raw materials and the unique architecture of the 13th-century chapel.
Base / Progetti per l’arte presents the exhibition of Jose Dávila. The project, specifically conceived for the occasion, consists of two site-specific sculptural installations which, crossing the two environments of the non-profit space in Florence, enter into conflict and in harmony with each other at the same time.
Jose Dávila’s third solo exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery. The exhibition is based upon research Dávila conducted during the pandemic into the iconography of the circle and its presence throughout art history in the 20th and 21st centuries.
Jose Dávila’s solo show at the Centro Internazionale di Scultura in Peccia, Switzerland. The project is curated by Guido Magnaguagno and is the institution’s inaugural exhibition.
Jose Dávila’s work confronts the fundamental forces of nature and affects the reality; it contains the power of the essential, the weight of raw materials. This exhibition takes a comprehensive trajectory through his sculptural investigations.
A public sculptural work composed of 21 concrete shapes, variations of a standard cube with river boulders balancing on top. A dynamic field of vibrant red-colored geometric forms with natural juxtapositions that punctuate and accentuate its surroundings.
The exhibition originates from the questioning of the material and phenomenological quality of the stone, one of the primeval elements, not only in sculpture but also culturally. An element that arises from nature and is in nature.
Jose Dávila has created site-specific sculptures from found objects on Cockatoo Island, metaphors for the forgotten welfare of sandstone, metals and discarded objects that once had usefulness and power.
This exhibition replicates the material and relational ecosystem that has emerged at Jose Dávila’s studio throughout years of continuous production. The gallery has been transformed into a work space, reflecting the procedures that precede the finished works.
For this site-specific work Dávila resorted to the museum’s open floor plan, industrial concrete foundation and high ceilings. Using locally sourced materials the artist created balancing and stacked sculptures, staging a struggle of opposing forces.
This project originates from a wide range of visual and historical references, as well as from a reflection on the production processes in which the studio plays a central role. The artist reinterprets our relationship with objects and the cultural significance of stone.
For his third solo exhibition at König Galerie, Dávila has poised disparate kinds of lithic bodies ranging from basalt stone and volcanic rock, to more quotidian materials like limestone and concrete against each other to create an interaction of volume and mass.
This intervention comprises a series of sculptures executed with volumes made with recinto, a kind of volcanic rock, and raw sandstone boulders. The interaction between the materials, reveals a relation of contrast in the Malecón habanero.
This large-scale sculptural work approaches an oneiric experience where different elements dialogue and generate a self-sufficient structural system, where fragility, resistance, calm and tension coexist.
For his first solo exhibition in Vienna, Dávila conceived a site-specific installation consisting of recent works and works created especially for the exhibition, which correspond to his many years of practice exploiting the characteristics of opposing materials.
An accumulative glyptotheque is deployed within the Villanueva Pavilion at the Royal Botanical Garden of Madrid. These columns-totems-monuments condense the aspirations that have infused sculptural practice throughout the centuries.
For this project, Dávila contributed with a large-scale installation depicting a structural system made up from correspondence and equilibrium, referencing the inherent possibility of collapse that menaces every system.
The starting point of this exhibition is the balance between contrary forces, which are triggered by the varied strength of the chosen materials. By readjusting contrary positions Dávila lets his work oscillate between fragility and stability, relief and tension.
Plaster casting molds used in the production of ceramics have been placed throughout the space, their insides gilded in gold leaf. The molds come from a local ceramic factory in Guadalajara, where Dávila is based, they exist as remnants of a process.
With this exhibition Dávila ascertains, through different sculptural works, that a moving structure maintains a sense of order in what seems unstable but still belongs to the realm of chaos.
The exhibited sculptures show a linked sequence of actions and reactions that are temporally paused when all the forces are in complete balance. Fragments and materials seem to work together as a conscious exertion for a specific common purpose.
The sculptural complex presents a series of concrete volumes immersed in a relationship of balance, interacting with unaltered boulders that behave as counterweights. The works are reflected and merge themselves into the urban grid that surrounds them.
Sense of Place is a multi-site, large-scale, public sculpture exhibition migrating through and integrating into the diverse urban landscape of Los Angeles to draw a kind of portrait of the city’s many experiences, geographies and histories.
The materials the artist has chosen to create this artwork make reference to Gateshead’s industrial past and are playfully suspended, creating a sense of tension as they appear in slow free-fall.
An unstable stillness whose suggestive poetry transforms the welcoming space of Il Salotto into a journey of unexpected reflections and tangible dialogues, in a field of flashes and symbols. A formal, visual and material aporia.
The exhibition presents Dávila’s signature fragile yet imposing space-filling installations. His sculptures play with the tensions inherent in physical forces, balance, and mass. Experimenting with the mutually supporting and opposing forces.
For his first exhibition at König Galerie, Dávila has created a site-specific sculpture that reacts directly to the space. It includes three large rectangular marble slabs, leaning towards the viewer and supported by dark ratchet straps conjoined by a metal ring.
The site-specific installation is composed of three, tilted pieces of marble held upright by industrial ratchet straps that stretch from the gallery’s walls. As such, the artist creates great dramatic visual and physical effects of scale and balance.
The exhibition expands upon Dávila’s career long investigation into how the modernist movement continues to be interpreted, appropriated, and reinvented, within the tenets of architecture, art history, and physical geometry.
The exhibition is arranged and rearranged to explain Dávila’s meditative needs. Confronting the exhibited artworks in order to challenge each other and provoke discourse of imagery, volume, space and line.
The artworks included in the exhibition refer to notions of balance and equilibrium, which are generated during the moment of withdrawal between two opposing forces that remained in conflict, finally ceding.
Dávila’s formula leans towards a dynamic understanding of balance, in which movement can only exist as a parenthetical phenomenon. Shapes are maintained and find their expression through the accumulation of tension which is also their point of origin.
As the title of the exhibition suggests, Dávila imbues his works with a remarkably light presence, emphasizing their diametrically opposed qualities. Dávila presents situations where fragility and resistance inhabit the same sculptural configuration.
All three-dimensional works of the exhibition have in common the joyous combination of colors and the artist’s willingness to put beside the spatial composition and the modernist game of balance and equilibrium the color itself in the foreground.
Praise to the Shadow is a set of marginal works stemming from a fracture found in Dávila’s work platform. These pieces had not been materialized in the past and therefore they were never shown. They constitute his day-to-day imagery.
The Space Beneath Us is a landscape work that interacts with human activity and scale to become part of the daily life of a park. The installation is a spatial take on the geometric structures of the Homage to the Square paintings and prints by Joseph Albers.
The exhibition takes Plato’s myth of the cavern as a departure point. Through the scope of Architecture and Art, the project focuses on the distance between perception and reality, history and memory, and is based on basic forms and a playful use of materials and space.
This project is a plastic consideration about local urbanism. As a kind of model that underpins the artist relation to the city of Guadalajara, Promise of a Better World concerns issues about the reference and the platonic idea.
Continuous Space is a sculpture with no beginning or end. Its characteristics incite the viewer to move around and ‘inside’ the work so that it can be fully grasped. The work glides out of the architectural boundaries into an extension of the street.
A constant in this exhibition is the reinterpretation of certain works from art history that have influenced Dávila, not only historically but also in scale, in their function and in dialogue with the physical and mental space where they are and are being perceived.
Davila created a dramatic sculptural presence within Bloomberg Space, appearing to be a floating mirage. Using simple building materials and neon light, he created an eloquent large-scale constellation of geometrical shapes suspended in space.
Over the course of three years, Dávila photographed objects that captured his attention as models for architecture. For this exhibition, Dávila pulled eleven photographs from this series, and refabricated the found object in each photograph.
A shipping container used for art transportation is repurposed as raw material. Instead of it being only the recipient of the work, it is the work itself, one that alludes to a Donald Judd’s sculpture in a walk-in, open, human scale.
The large hanging installation is a monolithic assembly of wood, aluminum and neon and was conceived as a sort of echo or sculptural double of the cultural associations spatial shell.
X, Y, Z brings together a series of works that approach the transformation of materials, especially in Architecture. The reconfiguration of modernist tradition becomes the starting point for creation.
In Dávila’s ephemeral architecture or ‘unfinished sculptures’ he implements conceptual strategies to confuse or undermine cultural meanings intrinsic and instrumental in the values of form and materials.
