Museum Haus Konstruktiv is dedicating a comprehensive solo exhibition to Mexican artist Jose Dávila (b. 1974 in Guadalajara, Mexico, where he lives and works). Alongside selected new paintings, a multitude of sculptural works are presented, which Dávila combines to produce surprising ensembles of works while conscientiously engaging with the museum’s architectural givens.

Jose Dávila is interested in space and mass, in mathematical laws and physical phenomena. Thus, his oeuvre characteristically plays with gravity and apparent weightlessness, with statics and dynamics, forces of tension and compression, and those precarious moments before something collapses. In addition, he incorporates natural and industrially manufactured materials; from this juxtaposition, he creates poetic works that are sensorially captivating and structurally articulated.

Dávila’s exhibitions and artistic projects reveal multiple links to 20th-century art history, especially to constructivist-concrete art, minimal art, arte povera and conceptual art. For example, with Objet du Voyageur (The traveler’s item), a bicycle wheel on a stacked tower of metal, concrete, and brick, Dávila alludes to Marcel Duchamp’s 1913 ready-made Roue de Bicyclette.