Juan Davila (Australia)

Chau Chak Wing Museum at the University of Sydney and Museum of Contemporary Art

Working between Chile and Australia, since the early 1970s Juan Davila has used the medium of painting to engage in debates around aesthetics, politics and sexuality, drawing on its rich and varied histories in Latin America, Australia, Europe and North America. Davila has brought to high art the visual landscape of popular culture, producing a uniquely provocative, powerful and influential body of work.  

As a visual archive, Davila’s works are not simply reflections of a society awash with images, but a carefully articulated questioning of the hierarchies applied to cultural material, and by extension, cultures. Davila opens up the hidden tensions that lurk beneath any official history or national mythology.