Mostly self-taught as a painter, he began as a sculptor, studying briefly at the Düsseldorf Academy of Arts before participating in a group exhibition at Alfred Flechtheim's gallery in 1914.
[citation needed] In 1925 he participated in the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) exhibition in Mannheim which brought together many leading "post-expressionist" artists, including Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, Alexander Kanoldt and Georg Schrimpf.
[7] A major work from Davringhausen's New Objectivity period is Der Schieber (The Black-Marketeer), a Magic realist painting of 1920–21, which is in the Kunstmuseum Düsseldorf im Ehrenhof.
[2] Although Davringhausen rarely presented social criticism in his work, in Der Schieber "the artist created the classic pictorial symbol of the period of inflation that was commencing".
[7] Much of Davringhausen's work was deposited in 1989 in the Leopold Hoesch museum in Düren, which has subsequently organized several exhibitions of his pictures, above all those from the later period.