Margot Samel is delighted to announce participation in Condo 2026, hosted by The Approach, London, and presenting a two-person exhibition of works by Leroy Johnson and Olivia Jia. Johnson and Jia shared a friendship in Philadelphia, and this presentation brings their work together for the first time.
With a documentarian’s eye but a poet’s gaze, Leroy Johnson (1937–2022, Philadelphia, PA) surveyed the pleasures, hardships, and contradictions within the Philadelphia neighbourhoods where he spent his life. Through his occupations as a social worker, rehab counsellor, teacher of disabled youth, and school administrator, Johnson pierced the fabric of collective human experience more deeply than most.
Constructed largely from materials found during his daily commutes, his house sculptures are replete with the textures of reality. Johnson represented the city as an accretion of marks. Intentional declarations graffitied on walls hold equal weight with the subtle beauty of the residue of life, of signage and surfaces worn and sunbleached past legibility—their degradation becomes, through Johnson’s attention, painterly abstraction authored not by a single artistic hand but by the vast social forces at play. These sculptures are labyrinths of referent and possibility.
Painted with what she describes as a “nocturnal” palette, Olivia Jia (b. 1994, Chicago, IL) creates works with a somnambulant quality, appearing as if scenes encountered in a state between sleep and waking. Frequently depicting imagined books and ephemera, each painting is constructed around a tableau that the artist has arranged, incorporating material collected by herself or held by family members, alongside references to American and Chinese art histories. Informed by Jia’s own diasporic identity as the child of Chinese immigrants to the United States, ideas of kinship, heritage, longing, and belonging are negotiated through the constellations of elements she gathers in her compositions. Staged in a studio workspace, depicted either late at night or in an imagined facsimile of that location, her paintings serve as tools with which a greater degree of self-recognition might be arrived at. The somberly lit surfaces upon which these objects and images appear function at once as tabletops or pinboards on which things might be placed, and as psychic spaces onto which desire might be projected.