2021
The Circularity of Desire | Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, US
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.
2020
Fuerza Bruta | Forum Guanajuato, León, MX
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.
To Each Era Its Art, To Art, Its Freedom | Central Wharf Park, Boston, US
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.
Las erupciones son frecuentes | Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Querétaro, Querétaro, MX
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.
NIRIN | 22nd Biennale of Sydney, AU
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.
El primer fuego | Travesía Cuatro, Guadalajara, MX
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.
Directional Energies | Dallas Contemporary, Dallas, US
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.
2019
Pensar como una montaña | Museo Amparo, Puebla, MX
This project originates from a wide range of visual and historical references, as well as from a reflection on the production processes in which the studio plays a central role.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.
The Moment of Suspension | König Galerie, Berlin, DE
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.
Los límites de lo posible | 13 Bienal de la Habana, Havana, CU
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.
Sueño autosuficiente | Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City, MX
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.
2018
A Simple Rule to Remember | Franz Josef Kai, Vienna, AT
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.
Not all those who wander are lost | Pabellón Villanueva del Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid, SP
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.
Cycles of Collapsing Progress | International Fair, Tripoli, LB
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.
Somewhere Behind the Eyes | Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf, DE
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.
The Body is Lost Outside | Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen, DK
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.
Mecánica de lo inestable | Galería OMR, Mexico City, MX
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.
Newton’s Fault | Galerie König, Berlin, DE
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.
2017
San Jacinto Sculpture Group | Parque San Jacinto, Guadalajara, MX
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 | LAND and Getty’s Pacific Standard Time, Los Angeles, US
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 Weaker has Conquered the Stronger | Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK
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.
Every Blind Wondering Ends in a Circle | Blueproject Foundation, Barcelona, SP
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.
Die Feder und der Elefant | Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg, DE
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.
The Stone that the Builder Refused | König Galerie, Berlin, DE
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.
2016
Practical Structures | SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, US
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.
Stones Don’t Move | Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, US
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 Elephant and the Feather | Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, US
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.
2015
Tectonic Acts of Doubts and Desire | Galería Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, SP
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.
2014
State of Rest | Galería OMR, Mexico City, MX
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.
The Lightness of Weight | Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, US
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.
2013
This Must Be the Place | Figge von Rosen Gallery, Berlín, DE
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.
2012
Praise to the Shadow | Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Zapopan, MX
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 | Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, US
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.
2011
Only the Shadow Knows | Galleria Gentili, Prato, IT
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.
Promise of a Better World | Galería Hotel Demetria, Guadalajara, MX
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.
2010
Continuous Space | MARCO, Museo de Arte Contemporanea, Vigo, SP
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.
2009
2+2=5 | Galería Travesía Cuatro, Madrid, SP
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.
2008
Flying City | Bloomberg Space, London, UK
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.
Studies for Future Buildings | Renwick Gallery, New York, US
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.
Untitled (Container) | Art Basel Miami Beach, Miami, US
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.
2007
Space after Space | Borgovico 33, Como, IT
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 | Zona MACO, Mexico City, MX
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.
2006
L’architetto Illegal | Galeria Studio Dabbeni, Lugano, CH
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.
