Renwick Gallery is pleased to announce Jose Davila’s first solo show in New York. The exhibition “Studies for Future Buildings” features sculpture and photography.

Over the last three years Davila has been taking pictures of objects that he comes across in different situations and places. He photographs objects that capture his attention as models for architecture. For his exhibition, “Studies for Future Buildings”, Davila has pulled eleven photographs from this series, and re-fabricates the found object in each photograph. In this instance, a photographic representation of a lost, original object informs a simulated, authentic object.

Davila refers to this moment as ‘hyper-production’: producing that which has already been produced in order to amplify its existence in reality. Davila interprets the found object as a model for architecture and uses this idea as both a starting and ending point. For Davila, the architecture model is imbued with the most attractive aspects of architecture; it is the place where ideas are free to explore, and where the abstract is involved in the genesis of a structure. Davila build these models in order to reverse the process of representation, and launch a circular process by which he not only appropriates an image, but also appropriates the idea of the found object by rebuilding it using the photograph as a blueprint. Davila creates these ‘model-objects’ because of capacity to subvert the process of documentation, to question the function of the object, and the process of appropriation of found objects. Using this technique, Davila sets out to question what makes a readymade a ready. When viewing the sculptures, they inspire a moment of doubt when the viewer has to determine if they are mere objects taken from the street or are indeed fabrications. Davila uses art’s artifice to reproduce reality, and by intention creates a hyper-real object. The objects become models of architecture’s principals and potential, released from the burdens of the everyday functions, and free from all the realities, architecture has to carry. They become art for art’s sake.

Jose Davila was born in 1974 in Guadalajara, Mexico. He presently lives and works in Guadalajara. Davila has exhibited recently in several solo exhibitions including, “Space After Space” with Borgovico 33 in Lake Como, Italy; and “The World of Yesterday” with El Eco Museum in Mexico City, Mexico. Group exhibitions include “Megastructures Reloaded” curated by Dennos Crompton in Berlin, Germany; “Extended Boarders: Shifting Carotgraphies” in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico; and “To Build, To Dwell, To Think” with IVAM in Valencia, Spain.