STUDIO LENCA

Born in La Paz, El Salvador, and now based at Tracey Emin‘s TKE Studios in Margate, UK, Studio Lenca creates vibrant figurative paintings and installations that address migration, identity, and belonging through the lens of Latin American diaspora experience, grounded in autobiography and social activism.

Early life and Background

Studio Lenca is the working name of José Campos, who left El Salvador as a child with his mother during the country’s civil war, travelling by land to the United States and growing up as an undocumented immigrant. He later settled in the United Kingdom, completing an MA at Goldsmiths, University of London, an experience that consolidated his focus on art to grapple with dislocation, visibility, and the politics of representation.

Before committing fully to visual art, Campos trained as a dancer, studying ballet and contemporary dance at the San Francisco School of the Arts (now known as the The Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts), where the discipline and choreography of movement shaped his sense of rhythm, gesture, and composition. This layered background of migration, performance, and education underpins Studio Lenca’s interest in bodies in motion, processional forms, and the theatricality of portraiture.

Studio Lenca Artworks

Studio Lenca’s artworks span painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and photography, often combining bold colour with stylised figures that directly reference Salvadoran traditions and migrant histories. His portraits frequently depict characters in sharp suits and wide-brimmed hats, surrounded by tropical flora and pattern, visual markers that celebrate Latin American identity while challenging stereotypes around migration and class.

A recurring motif is the Historiantes, folkloric dancers from El Salvador who re-enact oral histories of colonisation through elaborate costumes and choreography. In both painted and sculptural form, these figures become stand-ins for displaced communities, transforming personal and collective histories into images of pride and resilience rather than trauma alone.

In photography and installation, Studio Lenca often works collaboratively, using community-based processes that highlight labour, visibility, and the infrastructures that support migrant life. Works such as the installation of painted wooden cut-out figures made with immigrant workers foreground shared authorship and emphasise how making art can function as both testimony and celebration.

Studio Lenca Miami exhibition: Landscapes

In Miami, Studio Lenca’s practice has been highlighted through the exhibition Landscapes (1 December 2025–31 January 2026), presented with David Castillo, which centres terrain as both subject and metaphor. The exhibition brings together paintings and works featuring Historiantes-like figures and expansive grounds, using landscape to explore how questions of belonging, displacement, and identity unfold across multiple geographies—from El Salvador to the United States and the United Kingdom. Within the artist’s wider practice, Landscapes extends his ongoing interest in mobility and borders by treating land not as a static backdrop but as an active protagonist in stories of migration and community formation.

Studio Lenca Exhibitions and Collections

Studio Lenca has developed an international exhibition profile, with solo exhibitions at institutions and galleries in Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas. His work has also been included in significant group exhibitions that connect contemporary figurative painting with questions of identity, queerness, and Latinx and Central American diasporas.

Selected solo exhibitions include:

• Landscapes, David Castillo, Miami (2025–26) – Studio Lenca’s first solo exhibition in Miami, this show presents paintings in which Historiantes figures move through shifting terrains to explore belonging, displacement, and the politics of land.
• Leave to Remain, Carl Freedman Gallery, Margate (2024) – A major UK solo exhibition that reflects on the artist’s experiences of migration and bureaucracy, using sharply dressed protagonists and saturated colour to question who is allowed to ‘stay’.
• Chisme, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York (2023) – An installation of 15 life-size painted woodcut figures made in collaboration with low-wage immigrant workers, foregrounding migrant visibility and community storytelling.
• El Camino, Soho Revue, London (2022) – A series of paintings that frame walking and journeying as central metaphors, depicting suited figures navigating vibrant pathways that echo migrant routes.
• Alquimia, Finca Cortesin, Malaga (2022) – A project that draws on ideas of transformation and alchemy, situating Studio Lenca’s characters within lush, Mediterranean-inflected settings that speak to luxury, labour, and aspiration.
• El Jardin, Tang Contemporary Art, Bangkok (2021) – Paintings and installations that build a symbolic garden where Central American motifs intermingle with Southeast Asian context, underscoring the global movement of people and images.
• A Losing Game, Soho Revue, London, 2020 – An earlier London solo exhibition in which the artist developed his now-signature protagonists to address precarity, risk, and resilience within migrant and working-class narratives.

Selected group exhibitions include:

• Crossing Boundaries: Contemporary Figurative Perspectives, Tang Contemporary Art, Hong Kong
• 2024 Triennial, El Museo del Barrio, New York
• Ni de aquí, ni de allá, Untitled Art Fair, Miami

Studio Lenca’s work is held in prominent public and private collections, including the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Parrish Art Museum, Rubell Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, and other international collections.

Select public projects, residencies, and awards

Studio Lenca has undertaken residencies that reinforce his focus on transnational Latin American networks and community-based practice. These include:

• Fountainhead, Miami
• Adhesivo, Mexico City
• Artist-in-residence, Kates-Ferri Projects, New York

Awards and recognition include the Photo Fringe OPEN20 SOLO prize, for a body of photographic work exploring Historiantes and Salvadoran folkloric dance within diasporic contexts.

Studio Lenca FAQs

Ocula | 2025