Jose Margulis
Miami, Florida
Venezuelan-born, Miami-based artist creating kinetic geometric works that explore perception, language, movement, and uncertainty.
MessageJ. Margulis is a Venezuelan-born, Miami-based mixed-media artist whose work explores perception, movement, and the relationship between language and form. In December 2025, the Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art presented Speaking Volumes, his first solo museum exhibition, and acquired his work for its permanent collection, marking a significant milestone in his international career.
Drawing inspiration from the kinetic traditions of Latin American masters Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto, Margulis creates layered geometric constructions that transform with the viewer’s movement, turning observation into an active and participatory experience. Working primarily with Plexiglas, aluminum composite, automotive paint, and digitally fabricated components, he develops vibrant visual systems that merge color, light, structure, and motion.
His practice spans kinetic geometric reliefs, sculptural works, and text-based compositions in which language dissolves into pattern, allowing meaning to emerge through both reading and perception. Through repeated forms, layered structures, and dynamic color interactions, Margulis investigates themes of duality, uncertainty, and the role of the observer in shaping experience.
Margulis has exhibited extensively in galleries, museums, and international art fairs, including Art Basel Week, SOFA Chicago, and SP-Arte Brazil. His work is held in private and institutional collections, including the permanent collections of Erarta Museum of Contemporary Art and Museo Ixchel. In 2018, he was recognized as the Southeast United States winner of the Bombay Sapphire Artisan Series.
Today, Margulis continues to expand his visual language through kinetic geometry, sculptural experimentation, and emerging technologies that challenge the boundaries between object, image, space, and perception.
Statement
Meaning is not contained within the work. It emerges in the encounter between the work and the observer.
My work explores the space between what we see, what we know, and what remains uncertain.
Using layers of color, geometry, light, and language, I create structures that transform as the viewer moves through space. Rather than presenting a fixed image, the work unfolds through observation, inviting participation and discovery. Meaning is not delivered as a conclusion but emerges through the act of looking.
Influenced by the traditions of kinetic and perceptual art, I construct visual systems that shift according to perspective. Color relationships evolve, forms appear and disappear, and written language dissolves into abstract pattern before returning to legibility. In many of my works, text functions simultaneously as meaning and material, becoming both message and structure.
I am interested in the fertile territory between certainty and ambiguity, order and emergence, presence and absence. Through repetition, layering, and variation, I explore how perception itself participates in the creation of reality. The viewer is not simply an observer but an active presence whose movement completes the work.
My practice does not seek to illustrate ideas as much as create conditions for encountering them. The works are propositions rather than answers, spaces where meaning remains in motion. They invite contemplation of the ways we construct understanding through perception, language, memory, and expectation.
Ultimately, I seek to create moments of heightened awareness, experiences in which seeing becomes an act of discovery. In those moments, language becomes form, form becomes experience, and uncertainty reveals itself not as a limitation, but as a space of possibility.
Powered by Artwork Archive