Untitled (Woman in Bath), 2016
Photo: Agustin Arce
Collection
Archival pigment print
150 x 150 x 7.6 cm
Jose Dávila (b. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974) works in painting, sculpture and photography. Interested in how objects and images can be profoundly altered when presented in different media, he frequently experiments by translating artworks into forms and dimensions that differ from their original states. As such, the works which make up his practice can be viewed as arising out of a series of trials that he performs freely on artworks of his own, and canonical works from art history. In the case of the latter, he follows in the footsteps of a number of artists who have looked at how processes of transformation, reproduction and appropriation govern the contemporaneous production of images in relation to ancestral movements.
Having originally trained as an architect before beginning his career as a contemporary artist, Dávila has expressed a particular interest in how the principles and legacies of 20th century avant-garde art and architecture relate to each other. Surveying how modernism has impacted culture, through imitative and critical gestures, he tests its substance by reproducing signature works, styles, and tropes in different materials and contexts.
Acts of mimicry also direct Dávila’s work in painting, where he extends lineages that link artists such as Delacroix, Picasso, and Lichtenstein, picking up where they left off by continuing their sequences of reproduction in images such Untitled (Femmes d’Alger), 2016. Untitled (Woman in Bath), 2016 is from a series of works in which Dávila produces cut-outs from photographed sections of works by Lichtenstein, Prince, and Picasso. Modified in this way, with significant parts of the original sources absent, Dávila centers focus on essential structures that make these images recognizable. In his Lichtenstein adaptations, the viewer is directed to the thick black outlines and Benday dots that distinguished his work, and asked to consider how the meaning of Lichtenstein’s manually produced marks changes once returned to a form of mechanical (this time, digital) reproduction. –Elsa Gray
150 x 150 x 7.6 cm
Jose Dávila (b. Guadalajara, Mexico, 1974) works in painting, sculpture and photography. Interested in how objects and images can be profoundly altered when presented in different media, he frequently experiments by translating artworks into forms and dimensions that differ from their original states. As such, the works which make up his practice can be viewed as arising out of a series of trials that he performs freely on artworks of his own, and canonical works from art history. In the case of the latter, he follows in the footsteps of a number of artists who have looked at how processes of transformation, reproduction and appropriation govern the contemporaneous production of images in relation to ancestral movements.
Having originally trained as an architect before beginning his career as a contemporary artist, Dávila has expressed a particular interest in how the principles and legacies of 20th century avant-garde art and architecture relate to each other. Surveying how modernism has impacted culture, through imitative and critical gestures, he tests its substance by reproducing signature works, styles, and tropes in different materials and contexts.
Acts of mimicry also direct Dávila’s work in painting, where he extends lineages that link artists such as Delacroix, Picasso, and Lichtenstein, picking up where they left off by continuing their sequences of reproduction in images such Untitled (Femmes d’Alger), 2016. Untitled (Woman in Bath), 2016 is from a series of works in which Dávila produces cut-outs from photographed sections of works by Lichtenstein, Prince, and Picasso. Modified in this way, with significant parts of the original sources absent, Dávila centers focus on essential structures that make these images recognizable. In his Lichtenstein adaptations, the viewer is directed to the thick black outlines and Benday dots that distinguished his work, and asked to consider how the meaning of Lichtenstein’s manually produced marks changes once returned to a form of mechanical (this time, digital) reproduction. –Elsa Gray