Madrid,
Twenty-two years after Juan Uslé presented “Open Rooms” at the Velázquez Palace in El Retiro, a set of photographs and paintings that he carried out in the last decade of the 20th century – and which could later be seen in Santander, Ghent and Dublin -, this artist returns to the Reina Sofía Museum. He now offers a retrospective of his entire career that has been curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa and is titled “That ship in the mountain.”
Nearly a hundred of his creations, dating back four decades, can be seen on the first floor of the Nouvel Building; They come from private and public collections (including the funds of Uslé and Victoria Civera) and are articulated here in a circular and chronological route in which the relationships between their series in time are highlighted – he calls them families of works-.
The title of the exhibition comes from its starting point: the sinking, in 1960, of the ship Elorrio off the coast of Langre, near where the artist then lived with his family. Twenty-one people died. It is a living fact in the memory of Uslé, who recreated it early: before settling in New York in the mid-eighties.
From now on, the Reina Sofía delves into its series – in some cases, linked to specific exhibitions -; in a photographic practice that he has always maintained and that acquired, above all, vigor in the nineties; and in those ideas that have reappeared again and again in this author’s career: the journey as a process of discovery; the validation of very different types of beauty, also that which is not evident; and the possibility of capturing spaces and atmospheres that cannot be perceived in a quick contemplation.
From the very beginning, the exhibition reveals its circular approach, by linking works from the eighties and nineties with the large-format piece. Churchillbelonging to the set I dreamed that you revealed2021.
The eighties were a phase of transition for Uslé, geographically and emotionally: in that period he went from working in the isolated environment of Cantabria to doing so immersed in the cosmopolitanism of New York; also from materialism and impulsive gestures to a transcendent lyricism that still provided landscaping in the twilight.
Just when he was going to cross the Atlantic, the artist’s memory of the sinking of the Elorrio emerged as an unfinished episode and of the image that the ship offered in the press of his time: in 1960 Boat at the Sea (1986) collected the emotions linked to the storm that prevented the rescue of the sailors in the final stretch of their journey. Once installed in the United States, he thought about replicating that composition, but he did not do it exactly the same: In this second version the mountain, or hill, did not continue towards land, but was the center of an island. I clung to my last image like the ship clung to the land.
Other of his first New York works had to do with the Williamsburg Bridge, near his home, or were small black paintings. At the end of that decade of the eighties, Uslé moved from the internationally prevalent pictorial codes to the creation of interior and increasingly introspective landscapes. In the words of the commissioner, The waters become ghosts where what the waters hide emerges. It is no longer the place where childhood passes peacefully.
Visual impulses then arise that will be decisive in its production and which Kevin Power referred to as itching in the retina, problem and pleasure for the mind. The small canvases from 1991 are representative of that moment. Ryder Blue either Poppywhich could be seen that same year in the Palacete del Embarcadero in Santander and which precede in their composition, despite being still very defined, later works of larger format.
One of the rooms of the exhibition is focused on the painter’s participation in the ninth Documenta in Kassel, in 1992. He showed nine paintings characterized by the fusion of previous elements and the latent anticipation of new ones: among the former we can mention the tendency towards verticality, the palette, either dark or very lively, or liquid pigment; between the seconds, the grids that impose their own rhythm.
In families like Celibataires either NamasteUslé walked towards a clear opening; The larger format works of that first series contained both autonomy and connection to the whole. Also adding irony, he incorporated nods to Duchamp, Miró or Mondrian: Mi-Monalluding to the latter, suggests the dialogue between impossible or opposing options.
Fully integrated, at the beginning of the nineties, into the New York panorama, he managed to transfer the complexity of its urbanism and his daily life to his canvases; However, the issue of urban grammar (1992) or Kiesler Mountain Escape (1993) is nothing but its language; The technique is not hidden and gains primacy over the content linked to the city.
At the MNCARS we will see a barely exhibited piece that had not left the United States in the last twenty years: The Little Human Element (1998-1999), which takes up solutions already addressed while opening up to the rhizomatic to come.
In the nineties, the concern for memory or its lack was also established in his production: he built Amnesia (1992) only from the weight of the brushstroke on the canvas, or the indication that remains behind after it is erased. And for the cinema: Asa-Nisi-Masa (1994-1995), which takes its title from the magic words that a group of children pronounce in eight and a half by Fellini, is linked to his contemporary sun sicknesswhich evokes when, in his childhood, he spent several days in darkness due to sunstroke. As so many times on screen, some quarrels reveal diffuse realities.
At the end of that decade he also undertook the series I dreamed that you revealed. With them he started his intermittent painting made to the rhythm of their heartbeats: I move the brush and press until the next beat appears. I try to follow a sequential rhythm marked by my pulse and, therefore, I almost always work on these paintings at night, especially here in New York, because I need concentration and silence to feel it. The result varies depending on the works and days, depending on how calm or fast the pulse is. Blood pumping is not always the same. Repetition, introspection and rhythm, those basic ingredients of this set, will be hallmarks of his paintings, introducing subtle variations to them.
The reveal, in two senses, closes this anthology. We will see a selection of photographs, in which we can find convergences with painting and also opportunities to get closer to Uslé’s interest in the proximity between the private and the public, the real and the fictional. They are structured as a visual diary that allowed the artist to think about his canvases through the camera since one day he painted a room black to be a printing room.
Also the most recent images of the series I dreamed that you revealedstructured in vertical or horizontal white and dedicated to the time that the light, the sea and everyone’s hours undulate. The pulsations, in short, connect his work with life itself, in an organic and temporal sense, and make these compositions experiences detached on canvas; experiences that, more than emotional, we can understand as physical: we talk about breathing.
Uslé usually refers to these fabrics as contaminated abstractionconsidering that there is no greater purity than that which can be interpreted as absolute contamination of formal and mental references; The signs and gestures that populate his images seem static, but they are manifestations of what incessantly mutates or fades, like the light that penetrates through a skylight or the vague sounds of the night. The viewer will be able to perceive that it seeks to capture the transition from light to dark and the ways in which both soak up the colors.
Juan Uslé. “That ship in the mountain”
NATIONAL MUSEUM REINA SOFÍA ART CENTER. MNCARS
C/ Santa Isabel, 52
Madrid
From November 26, 2025 to April 20, 2026
