Born 1974 in Guadalajara, Mexico Lives and works in Guadalajara

Jose Dávila has challenged his own practice and created site-specific sculptures from found objects on Cockatoo Island, the site of an early colonial quarry, a British convict precinct of incarceration, a place where ships were built for the Second World War, and now a protected UNESCO site. The sculptures are metaphors for the forgotten welfare of sandstone, metals and discarded objects that once had usefulness and power. When we look at these sculptures, they teeter as if to fall, yet hold themselves together through uncanny support, a careful and precise game with gravity, and a trick of the eye. It is surprising – in their new combinations, these discarded materials survive to reflect our own rejection of them, like a memory trying to get back to a place of visibility.

Jose Dávila’s work is a constant search for moments of shared reciprocity between paradoxical elements. By means of a structural intuition, Dávila produces constructive situations in which tension and stillness, geometric order and random chaos, fragility and resistance, are fluctuating commonplaces for materials in continuous transformation. Based on the specificity of the materials that he uses, Dávila highlights their inherent contradictions, pushing the boundaries of perception in order to challenge the relation between form and content. Commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney. Courtesy of the artist and König Galerie, Berlin.