Juan Davila / Chile/Australia b.1946 / The shearer 1983 / Watercolour, gouache and collage / Six sheets: 152 x 100.7cm (each); 300 x 300cm (overall) / Purchased 1989 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art / © Juan Davila

Juan Davila
The shearer 1983

Not Currently on Display

Juan Davila’s The Shearer 1983 serves to demonstrate the return to painting in the early 1980s, especially reinvigorated forms of figuration. As an immigrant to Australia, Davila’s deconstructive approach explores significant content in Australian contemporary art, addressing his ‘outsider’ status in a modernist context.

Davila takes readily identifiable iconography by Australian artists such as Sidney Nolan (1917—92), Albert Tucker (1914–99) and John Nixon (1949–2020), and sets up a dialogue between these local protagonists of expressionism and constructivism and those from the European Transavantgarde movement. The stick figure imitating the German artist A.R. Penck (1937–2017), for instance, bears the Antipodean head that is characteristic of Albert Tucker. In doing so, Davila collapses the notion of distinctly separate spheres of cultural activity but at the same time points out uniquely nationalistic differences.

Juan Davila was born in Santiago, Chile, and emigrated to Australia in the wake of Augusto Pinochet’s 1974 military coup. His work often addresses the role of art in both countries, and questions how visual language is used in political, social and cultural contexts.

Davila draws on a wide range of visual references, including corporate logos, Pop art, gay pornography and Latin American political satire. The purpose of his work is ‘to propose an alternative reading of art history, if you like, to play with the idea of belonging’.1 Davila’s method of citation and quotation challenges ideas of authorship of ‘official’ histories, while his portrayal of figures of mixed races, genders and sexualities confronts social anxieties about difference.

Endnotes:

1. Juan Davilia, ‘Interview with Juan Davilia [by Paco Barragán]’, Art Pulse, [2016], <artpulsemagazine.com/interview-with-juan-davila>, viewed January 2021.