Jose Dávila

Jose Dávila is a self-taught, multimedia Mexican artist who appropriates art history and recontextualizes famous paintings, sculptures, photographs and even installations to investigate Western systems of cultural value. Part homage, part mimicry, part critique, his works do not directly reproduce his references but instead subtly subvert them, invoking Donald Judd’s stacked rectangles through cardboard, Josef Albers’s concentric squares through glass sheets or Jeff Koons’ blue gazing balls through painted stone. In each new hybrid works, he explores how the modernist and minimalist movements have been circulated, absorbed and reinvented around the world.

Dávila was born in Guadalajara, Mexico in 1974, and he continues to live and work there. He studied architecture at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Occidente before pursuing a fine arts practice, although architecture remains a strong influence in his work. He has referenced numerous modern and contemporary artists such as Dan Flavin, Tom Wesselman and Alicjia Kwade, while his appropriation and critique-based practice has conceptual predecessors in Michael Asher, Richard Prince, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Lawler and Andrea Fraser. Dávila won the EFG ArtNexus Latin America Art Award in 2014, and he has also received an award from the Andy Warhol Foundation, a Kunstwerke residency in Berlin and the National Grant for young artists by the Mexican Arts Council (FONCA).