Jose Dávila’s cut-out series began in 2008, initiating an ongoing body of work informed by his questioning of art historical canons. Reappropriation has become a main feature of Dávila’s artistic concept: he engages with familiar and readily identifiable images drawn from both the visual arts and popular culture, establishing an extended dialogue with figures who have shaped the canon of modern art, including Pablo Picasso.

By progressively dissecting the photographic reproductions of Picasso's works, Dávila removes the principal subject, drawing attention to the structure of the image. In this way, the fractured and decomposed language of Cubism is transferred to the very surface of the image itself. The technique also draws upon the Mexican folk-art tradition of papel picado, which Dávila adapts to contemporary art in order to explore the generative potential of negative space.

As with Dávila’s sculptures, which often push structural foundations to their limits, these cut-outs seem perpetually on the verge of collapse—physically as well as conceptually. When the central image has been excised, how can the composition continue to stand, or even exist in its own right? Yet the surrounding space suddenly assumes a more active role, animating and completing the void. Through this act of removal, Dávila simultaneously pays homage to and critiques Picasso, an icon of twentieth-century art.

Jose Dávila received formal training in architecture at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudio Superiores de Occidente. Drawing on his training as an architect and his knowledge of art history, Dávila creates sculptural installations, photographic works and paintings that simultaneously emulate, critique, and pay homage to 20th century avant-garde art and architecture. Throughout his artistic career, Dávila’s practice has explored spatial occupation and the transitory nature of physical structures. Referencing artists and architects from Luis Barragán and Mathias Goeritz to Josef Albers and Donald Judd, Dávila’s work investigates the expanded possibilities of the modernist movement through its translation, appropriation, and reinvention.

Dávila is widely celebrated for his sculpture and public installation practice. In his sculptures, Dávila employs industrial and quotidian materials to make simultaneously humorous and critical reference to Modernist masterworks of art and design. In these works, materials are held in semiotic and structural tension – balanced both between high and low culture, and between permanence and collapse. Employing gravity and chance as materials, Dávila’s carefully arranged, and precariously balanced works expand the conventions of historical forms, and test the limits of the medium of sculpture. In 2017, the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND) presented a mid-career survey of Dávila’s work alongside a newly commissioned sculptural project which installed works by Dávila in a number of sites across Los Angeles. Dávila has also presented public sculpture in San Jacinto Park, Guadalajara; Rockefeller Plaza, New York; and Regent’s Park, London, among other locations. In 2019, Dávila presented a large-scale public installation, Los Límites de lo Posible, at the Malécon Habanero, in Havana, Cuba as a part of the XIII Bienal de La Habana.

Jose Dávila has presented solo exhibitions at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich, Switzerland; the Dallas Contemporary, Texas; the Museo Universitario del Chopo, Mexico City; and the Museo del Novecento, Florence, amongst others. His work is in the permanent collection of numerous institutions including the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City, Mexico; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; Inhotim, Brumadinho, Brazil; the Perez Art Museum, Miami, Florida; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; the San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Hamburg Kunsthalle, Hamburg; the Zabludowicz Collection, London; and the Museum of Modern Art, Luxembourg. Dávila was the winner of the 2016 BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art’s New Annual Artists’ Award, the 2014 EFG ArtNexus Latin America Art Award, and has been the recipient of support from the Andy Warhol Foundation, a Kunstwerke residency in Berlin, and the National Grant for young artists by the Mexican Arts Council (FONCA) in 2000. In 2022, Hatje Cantz published a major monograph illustrating the past twenty years of Davila’s practice.

Jose Dávila currently lives and works in Guadalajara, Mexico.