Over the years, Dávila has developed an iconic body of works based on apparently precarious constructions that seem to challenge gravity. Using industrial and organic elements such as steel, stone and glass balanced in minimalistic assemblages, he defines an aesthetics of equilibrium.
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 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This project originates from a wide range of visual and historical references, as well as from a reflection on the production processes in which the studio plays a central role.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.
