The Mid-Century Material That Refuses to Age
Contemporary artist Migdalia Salazar
transforms photography into structure using layered transparency
Migdalia Salazar, Flux #1, 2025 | 39x39x3.50 inches.
Original archival fine art print on Hahnemuhle Baryta paper, featuring a direct recording of moving multicolored lights in motion, enhanced with two partially super imposed layers of colored acrylic and encased in a transparent acrylic box.
Light in Motion photography series. Unique piece.
MIAMI SHORES, FL — January 2026 — In the decades following World War II, a new visual language emerged across architecture, interiors, and decorative arts. Known today as mid-century modern, the movement favored clarity over ornament, structure over excess, and an optimistic belief in progress. Clean lines, geometric forms, and an openness to new materials defined a style that sought to integrate art into everyday life rather than separate it from it.
Mid-century design was not about nostalgia or decoration alone. It was about experimentation; rethinking how space could be lived in, how light could move through a room, and how materials traditionally associated with industry could be reimagined as tools for beauty and function. Transparency, repetition, and modularity became central ideas, allowing objects and environments to feel both rational and emotionally light.
One of the materials that came to embody this spirit was plexiglass. Lightweight, transparent, and industrial, it allowed designers and architects to break away from heavy structures and opaque surfaces. Plexiglass softened rigid geometries, invited light into form, and blurred the boundaries between interior and exterior, object and space.
Decades later, Venezuelan artist Migdalia Salazar returns to this material not as a nostalgic gesture, but as a contemporary tool; one that still has the capacity to question how we see, move, and inhabit space.
Currently on view at CLAUG Creative Studio, Salazar’s latest work exists somewhere between photography, sculpture, and architectural object. At first glance, it appears photographic: planes of color, traces of architecture, layered compositions. But as the viewer moves, the image shifts. Color intensifies or dissolves. Lines slide past one another. Light becomes an active participant.
This is photography that refuses to stay flat.
Salazar builds her works by combining photographic images of architectural fragments with modular layers of acrylic and plexiglass. These transparent planes do not simply protect or frame the image; they create volume, depth, and motion. The result is an object that behaves more like a structure than a picture changing depending on where you stand, how light hits it, and how long you stay with it.
Migdalia Salazar next to her piece Flux #1, 2025 at CLAUG Creative Studio
during the opening event of Reflections, Forms, and Thoughts.
Her interest in plexiglass is deeply intentional. Widely used in mid-century modern architecture and design (from furniture to façades—it was celebrated for its ability to open space, invite light, and suggest progress. Salazar reclaims these qualities, using the material to create a contemporary experience of perception rather than a historical reference.
“I’m not interested in capturing a copy of what is real,” Salazar explains. “My work is about recreating the world—fragmenting architecture, abstracting its forms, and allowing perception to transform as the viewer moves.”
Trained originally in civil engineering and architecture, with later studies in painting, fashion design, and photography across Caracas, Milan, London, Canada, and Miami, Salazar approaches image-making as a form of construction. Influenced by constructivist traditions, she treats photography not as documentation but as raw material—something that can be cut, layered, expanded, and reassembled.
Rather than romanticizing mid-century modernism, Salazar extracts their underlying principles—geometry, rhythm, transparency—and tests their relevance today. Her goal is not to look backward, but to demonstrate how these visual languages can still shape contemporary sensibility.
Migdalia Salazar next to her piece Untitle 1, 2018 at CLAUG Creative Studio
during the opening event of Reflections, Forms, and Thoughts.
As viewers move in front of the piece, the work responds. Layers seem to vibrate. Color stretches beyond its own surface. Photography becomes spatial; structure becomes image. The experience is quiet but dynamic—less about spectacle, more about sustained attention.
In an era dominated by screens and instant images, Salazar’s work asks something different: to slow down, to move, and to notice how perception itself is built.
Exhibition & Availability
The work is currently on view at CLAUG Creative Studio, Miami Shores.
About Migdalia Salazar
Migdalia Salazar is a Venezuelan photographer and visual artist from Caracas. With a background in civil engineering, architecture, painting, and fashion design, her multidisciplinary practice merges photography with acrylic structures to create sculptural, perceptual works. Influenced by constructivist art, Salazar explores fragmentation, movement, and the emotional potential of abstraction, positioning photography as both image and object.
