Surfacing Forms

Nicolas Auvray Gallery is pleased to present Surfacing Forms, a new exhibition by J. Margulis opening this September. Bringing together forty-one positional reliefs, from intimate wall works to immersive multi-panel compositions, it is the most extensive presentation of the artist’s practice to date.

Constructed from painted, faceted slats set at precise angles, Margulis’s reliefs contain multiple compositions within a single structure. The works remain static while the image shifts with the viewer, revealing changing arrangements of color and form.

Born in Venezuela, Margulis engages the country’s rich history of kinetic and perceptual art, associated with artists such as Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto. Through complex surfaces and an expansive chromatic vocabulary, Surfacing Forms explores perception as fluid, spatial, and dependent on the viewer’s movement.

About Surfacing Forms:

These works refuse stillness, not through mechanism but through the body of the viewer. Each positional relief is composed of painted, faceted slats angled away from the wall, holding within a single structure more than one image at once. Approach from the left and one composition emerges; shift a few steps to the right and it gives way entirely to another. The surface itself does not change. The viewer does.

You see it as you move.