Jose Dávila’s photographic work and installations reflect on twentieth-century art and pay homage to seminal figures in American Minimalism and European abstraction. Dávila explores how these tendencies have been interpreted and appropriated over time to open new discourses. In his cutouts, Dávila manually extracts the central image from photographs of iconic artworks and renowned monuments. By introducing these white voids, where negative space becomes the focus, he creates a three-dimensionality akin to his sculptural work and comments on the relationship between subject and context.
‘Untitled (Interior with Mirror)’ (2019) is from a series that references Roy Lichtenstein’s paintings. In these photographs, Dávila deconstructs Lichtenstein’s signature portraits, brushstrokes and interiors. He plays with the idea of appropriation, an essential component of Lichtenstein’s practice. Inspired by advertisements and comic books, Lichtenstein developed his distinctive technique of using Ben-Day dots in his series of interiors to define the room, delineate the furniture and create the illusion of space. Two works from this series are in the UBS Art Collection.