MADRID.- The exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain surveys the far-reaching career of Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954), an artist who lives between New York and Cantabria and has been regarded as one of the foremost artists in Spain and internationally in recent decades. Uslé’s work is characterised by a perpetual exploration of lyrical abstraction, where painting becomes rhythm, respiration and memory in the articulation of a deeply intimate visual language that oscillates between the gestural and the geometrical.

This major anthological survey, curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa, runs from 26 November 2025 to 20 April 2026 and unfolds on Floor 1 of the Museo Reina Sofía’s Nouvel Building. The show travels through four decades of the artist’s work, assembling close to a hundred of his creations, which are part of public and private collections, and a collection conserved by Juan Uslé and Victoria Civera. The exhibition’s circular structure comprises eleven rooms arranged chronologically, whilst also conveying the interrelations that exist in Uslé’s different series and “families” of works, all of which overlap in time. The selection of pictorial and photographic works delves deeper into the ways the artist has created, discovered, evolved and revisited territories across the length and breadth of an expansive career.

That Ship on the Mountain is the second exhibition in the Museo Reina Sofía devoted to Juan Uslé. The first, Open Rooms (2003), was unfurled in the Palacio de Velázquez and toured around different international galleries. More than twenty years on, the point of departure of this fresh revision of the artist’s trajectory is an event that remained etched in his memory: the sinking of the Elorrio ship in 1960 off the coast of Langre (Cantabria), a location close to where Uslé lived with his family. This event bound to his childhood is one memory the artist recalls assiduously and began to depict in his artistic creations shortly before he crossed the Atlantic to take up residence in New York.

The show includes pieces from Juan Uslé’s different series, those he customarily calls families, for instance Soñé que revelabas (SQR) [I Dreamed that You Revealed], Celibataires, Rizomas [Rhizomes], Nemasté, Manthis and The Last Dreams of Captain Nemo. The survey begins with a series linked to now-iconic exhibitions such as those held in 1987 at Montenegro gallery (Madrid) and the 1988 show at the Farideh Cadot gallery (New York), assembled in the publication Williamsburg (1989), and flows through myriad other solo shows, such as Ultramar (1991); Festina Lente (1992); Peintures Celibataires (1994); Back & Forth (1996); Ojo roto (1996); Vanishing Lines (1998); Blind Entrance (1999); the above-mentioned Open Rooms (2003); Nudos y Rizomas (2010); Soñé que revelabas (2014); Dark Light (2014); and Ojo y Paisaje (2021). Moreover, it casts light on Uslé’s participation at documenta IX (1992) and the photographic practice he embarked upon in his early paintings and further cemented as a stand-alone language in the 1990s. The exhibition discourse seeks to link the Spanish artist’s life and work, drawing parallels between periods and families, which, although seemingly different, give rise to the exploration of the work of an artist whose versality co-exists with the cogency of his artistic intent.

The artist underscores some of the recurring ideas in his work, for instance “the intention of not remaining in the comfort zone of style”, leading him towards “a constant process of discovery, of travel or journeying”, and also the “investigation of different forms of beauty, those which do not have to be the most obvious”, or “the importance of the spatial and the atmospheric, which often give rise to an ambiguity, a complexity that requires a long period of contemplation and listening”.

That Ship on the Mountain situates visitors in a territory that straddles the lived and dreamed, a place nestled between full consciousness and oneiric delirium. Furthermore, it spans the forty years of the artist’s oeuvre, where the chronological and the discursive are woven into an evolving practice shaped by formal diversity, in addition to forming connections between families of works and lived experiences that have defined his trajectory, from the works inspired by Atlantic transit to Soñé que revelabas (I Dreamed that You Revealed), a pivotal series that has moulded his style for the past thirty years.

Room 1. Introduction

The purpose of the first room of the show is twofold: to serve as a starting point and for the survey to come full circle, igniting a dialogue between Juan Uslé’s early works, painted in the late 1980s, and his recent output, made in 2024 and 2025. Therefore, three small-scale canvases are displayed: Sin título (Untitled, 1987), Sin título (Untitled, L’observatoire series) [1988] and Sin título (Untitled, Nemasté series) [1990], alongside the large-scale painting Soñé que revelabas (Churchill) [I Dreamed That Your Revealed, 2021].

The starting point is an event which stayed with Uslé: the sinking of the Elorrio ship in 1960 off the coast of Langre (Cantabria), close to where he lived with his family. The event explores at once childhood memory and future uncertainty and the weight of the present, concepts which in Uslé’s painting have often been read from a position of both irony and sadness.

The room also includes examples of the artist’s investigations and explorations within a four-decade time span, revealing the connections between paintings of Atlantic travel in the late 1980s and one of the most recent works from the Soñé que revelabas family, a series running centrally through the artist’s trajectory from the late 1990s to the present day.

Room 2

The exhibition’s second room gathers works Uslé produced from 1986 to 1989, a period of geographical and emotional transition. Before moving to New York in 1987, the artist had created his work in the natural and secluded environment of Spain’s Cantabria province. In 1986, within the series Río Cubas, he painted 1960 Boat at Sea (1986) and Casita del norte (Little Northern House, 1986), with the first work revealing an event etched in Uslé’s childhood memory: the tragedy of the Elorrio ship. The second represents a headland with a small structure serving as a basic shelter, essential for spending the night. Both pieces show the way in which, after a series of materic and gestural creations, and wrought more impulsively, his painting “now disembarks in a more transcendental, lyrical and unsettling style, imparting a kind of shadowed landscape”, in the words of the curator.

It was at this time of transition, in which Juan Uslé and Victoria Civera planned to move from Cantabria to New York, when the memory of the wreckage of Elorrio surfaced, referred to most notably in the way the artist had assimilated it as an unfinished episode, where the printed stills in the newspapers of the time interweave with the image moulded by memory. 1960 Boat at the Sea also reflects the emotions of the huge storm that interfered with the sailors being rescued in the final part of their transatlantic voyage.

In January 1987, Uslé crossed the Atlantic Ocean, in the opposite direction to the Elorrio, to settle in New York City. As he has explained on different occasions, he initially felt the urge, in his new setting, to replicate that painting, but “in this second version the mountain, or hill, did not continue towards land but rather was the centre of an island. I clung to my latest image as the boat clung to land”.

In his first period of residence in New York he lived by the Williamsburg Bridge, the place where he began a series of works related to this transit hub, for instance 1960 Williamsburg (1987) and Negro Williamsburg (Black Williamsburg, 1987). Also surfacing at this time were the series on paper Engo NY (1987), The Book of Landscapes (1987–88) and Ojo y paisaje (Eye and Landscape, 1988–89), a continuation of Islas y Niceas (Islands and Niceas, 1986), paintings which were displayed in his solo show held at the Montenegro gallery in Madrid, organised shortly before he set off for the USA. Situated in these early New York years we find his small-scale black paintings, which tie in with his Williamsburg period, in a similar fashion to the Ojo y paisaje works belonging to his Nemo and Nemasté series.

Room 3

The works in room 3 manifest a time of profound change in Juan Uslé’s painting. In a brief four-year period, his output transitioned from a highly personal vision of the predominant international language of the time to a more introspective exploration focused on discovering and unearthing shelter in the inner landscape.

The room features three large-scale paintings: Gulf Stream (1989), Etelvina (1990) and Veneno (Poison, 1990–91), all of which were displayed at the Nave Sotoliva gallery in Santander as part of the 1991 exhibition Ultramar (Overseas) and consummated the shift he sketched in his Nemo (1988–1990) and Nemasté (1989–1990) series.

The show’s curator, Ángel Calvo Ulloa, points to: “A certain sombre, ghostly tendency observed in his landscape paintings. The gouache pieces become spectres where things hidden by water emerge. It is no longer a place where childhood placidly unfolds, nor is it the memory of the summer of 1986 that Uslé and Civera spent in the church of Susilla de Valderredible, away from Santander and the small art world that holidayed on the coast. A coast of calm seas, gentle temperatures and serenity which would bear little or no relation to the coast Uslé was painting, if in fact it was the coast he was painting, and not an interior”.

At this point a series of visual impulses emerged with “a certain sense of communion, a stinging eye, both problem and pleasure for the mind”, as Kevin Power asserted. These compulsions we accompanied by a series of small-scale canvases, for instance Ryder blue and Amapola (1991), all highly defined and controlled compositionally, but, nevertheless, a precursor to the larger scale paintings that characterised his work in the 1990s and 2000s. The three pieces were shown at the Palacete del Embarcadero as part of the Ultramar exhibition (Santander, 1991).

Room 4

Part of this room is devoted to Juan Uslé’s participation at the 1992 documenta IX in Kassel, curated by Belgian curator Jan Hoet. The works Guess-Who, Engo-Engo, Pío-Peo and Mi-Món (1992) were among the nine paintings selected for the event, and discernible in this period is also the fusion of previously explored elements and others at the threshold of being revealed. The customary resources applied include a compositional verticality, the liquidity practiced in some of his transitional paintings and the colour range that often draws either on a dark palette — blues and browns invoking Casita en el norte (1986), 1960 Boat at Sea (1986) and Veneno (1990–1991) — or on tones with more vibrant blues, yellows, reds, pinks and whites, as in Paint-Point (1991), Feed-back (1992-93) and Fragmentos ibéricos (Iberian Fragments, 1992–93). Equally, squares materialise which mark a rhythm of repetition and annotation that begins to appear recurrently. A case in point is Red Works (1992) and Mi-Món (1992), two works which marked the start of the Celibataires series of paintings. The generative idea in Celibataires also appears in the series Nemasté (1989–1990), which presages a shift of approach and sets forth a progressive immersion towards a more open syntax.

Room 5

Room 5 explores the 1990s in greater depth. In the first half of this decade, Juan Uslé laid the foundations for Nemasté, doing so with a principle of freedom which led him to tread a different path in each work. One radical drift ends at his large-scale Peintures celibataires, with a conceptual nod to Marcel Duchamp. Each picture is conceived as a self-sufficient entity, and with elements and solutions that distinguish each work, while also linking a series with a unit defined by difference. This stage also witnessed the consolidation of certain formal games — not without a dose of irony — which demonstrate the diversity of sources feeding into the painter’s work. These reflect the inspiration he drew from figures such as Joan Miró and Piet Mondrian, whose influence is foregrounded in the piece Mi-Món (1992), displayed in the previous room. The work marked the start of a period in which Uslé looked to bring about seemingly impossible encounters or dialogues between opposing stances.

During those years, Uslé was in step with New York rhythms, with the urban experience manifesting in his paintings. The complexity of the major city is expressed in works like Gramática Urbana (Urban Grammar, 1992) and Huida de la montaña de Kiesler (1993), which also reaffirm the early stages in a pictorial shift — many of these works were developed in a space where any childhood memory, daily anecdote or imagined scene is expressed on the canvas by means of a language that becomes a theme. The poise of Uslé’s art-making meant technique was seldom hidden behind major concepts, and the content would not overshadow the way in which a work was executed. Ambiguity would increase with the titles the artist chose for his works, evolving to become independent units of meaning. From the mid-1990s, the variants proliferated as if Uslé made room for many painters, for instance in Celibataires and the ensembles of In Urbania, Rizomas and Eolo, each one part of a family of idiosyncrasies, stances and different solutions.

Salient in this room is The Little Human Element (1998–1999), a pertinent work that serves as a connection between the Celibataires paintings and the rhizomatic. This painting has been rarely displayed and transported from New York after two decades.

Room 6

Memory is established as a core element also in its absence, when it is lost. Juan Uslé has spoken of “amnesiac” paintings, “as they have forgotten images, just as those ‘black works’ from the first year of arriving in New York forgot them”. This is the context of Amnesia (1992), a stand-alone creation in his repertoire. Kevin Power would talk of the painting as “being established on the basis of that which is forgotten, produced from literal minimums of paint; only the weight of the brushstroke on canvas and the trace, the mass left behind once the stroke has been erased, remain”.

Just a few years later, paintings such as Asa-Nisi-Masa (1994–95) would come into being, the title of which was taken from Federico Fellini’s film 8½ (1963), alluding to magic words uttered by children in a dream-like scene in the film. Moreover, the work is linked to the picture Uslé called Mal de sol (Sun Bad, 1994), which evokes an event from his childhood when he had to remain in semi-darkness after getting sunburnt. In these white-backgrounded works, the tenuous light betrays blurred images through the cracks that come from the ends of each brushstroke.

The nexus between Uslé’s paintings and film is touched on in Érik Bullot’s text in the exhibition catalogue, with the assertion that his art-making “is undoubtedly situated at the interface, at the inside-outside interaction, between reality and its double, in the membrane of an imaginary screen of which he is the projectionist”.

Room 7

This space contains the first two works with the title Soñé que revelabas, which converse with other paintings from the late 1990s, a key phase in the artist’s career.
Soñé que revelabas I (1997) was shown at the exhibition Vanishing Lines, which opened in the Soledad Lorenzo gallery in Madrid in February 1998, while Soñé que revelabas II (1998–99) went on view a year later, in a show called Blind Entrance held at the Cheim & Read gallery in New York. The two paintings would not yet make up the series, but they did contain the cadence Juan Uslé has described when talking about the creative process that gives rise to his SQR works: “They are clipped brushstrokes, the result of intermittent contact: I move the brush and press down until the following beat appears. I try to follow a sequential rhythm marked by my pulse and, therefore, I almost always work on these paintings at night, particularly in New York, because I need concentration and silence to feel it. The result varies depending on the work and the day, according to the calmness or speed of the pulse. The blood doesn’t always pump in the same way”.

In the two aforementioned exhibitions, other works made in the same year were also displayed: Rizoma mayor (1998), Manthis (1998–99), Casita del norte III (1997) and Bilingual (1998–99), in addition to other paintings in adjoining rooms like Rizoma’s (1997), The Little Human Element (1998-99) and Encerrados (Amnesia) (Enclosed [Amnesia], 1997). These works all bore witness to the relevance of the time in which they were produced, a period in which Uslé cemented his more personal pictorial language, shaped by repetition, rhythm and introspection.

Room 8

The eighth room in the show establishes a dialogue between a canvas from the Soñé que revelabas (SQR XI, 2002) series and La novia de Belchite (The Bride of Belchite, 2008) and Fagocimanthis (2010).

The co-existence of Soñé que revelabas with other families of works is a constant running through Uslé’s work, hence many of his exhibitions including time-honoured dialogues. A work such as Manthis (1998–1999) gives rise to a family the artist would briefly return to in the period between 2010 and 2012, a time in which the SQR pattern rose to the fore, limiting formal deviations to a minimum. This also occurred with series such as In Kayak, within which El constructor de imágenes (The Image Constructor, 2010) is a clear point of departure, and in self-standing paintings such as La novia de Belchite (2008) and Ojos de Fallujah (2003-04).

The consolidation of the Soñé que revelabas ensemble of works coincided with the turn of the millennium, and in the first decade of the 2000s the canvas series gained solidity, progressively occupying more space in Juan Uslé’s workdays. Starting in 2014, the internal logic of these paintings prevailed, reorientating the dialogue between pictorial families that had been taking shape over the previous two decades. The process cemented a model which, over time, would be traversed by variations and subtle gestures capable of bestowing full autonomy on each SQR.

Paintings such as Soñé que revelabas XI (Airport) (2002) and Soñé que revelabas XV (2002) illustrate with clarity how the gradual incorporation of variants transformed the SQR family into fertile ground that would progressively become richer.

Rooms 9 and 10

The installation Línea Dolca (Dolca Line, 2008–2018), made up of 170 photographs and nine paintings, is displayed in two of the core rooms in the survey. After many years using stills as an instrument of support, photographs gained a stronger presence to become the chief medium of this installation. A continuous row of small-scale images line the perimeter of the rooms, on a chocolate-brown background, to create an immersive visual narrative which explores the photographic and the pictorial, the urban and the natural, reality and fiction, the private and the public. The images are of landscapes, still-lifes, portraits, nooks in the artist’s house and studio, scenes from his travels, and abstract surfaces. The ensemble forms a kind of visual diary revealing his gaze and creative universe — photographs have been Uslé’s medium for thinking about painting for a number of years. Back in the 1990s, Kevin Power stressed how “extraordinary it is to see how his photos, taken some years ago, relate with such force to some of the works he now makes in his New York studio. Photos of the sky taken out of an airplane window, train tracks shot from the platform, photos of simple architectural elements”.

In this installation, a childhood memory once again provides the common thread to a complex visual narrative. The tone of the upper strip of the Línea Dolca installation and the work’s title allude to an old family photograph taken a few years before the sinking of the Elorrio ship, in which the painter was holding a bar of Dolca chocolate.

Rooms 10 and 11

The concluding rooms in the exhibition centre on the Soñé que revelabas family. Juan Uslé often recalls how, during his university years in Valencia, he and his partner Victoria Civera decided to paint their bedroom walls black, turning it into a darkroom — the act marked the start of his relationship with photography as a tool and medium of expression. Years later, the gesture would provide the inspiration for Soñé que revelabas, the title he gave to an extensive series of paintings which have formed the backbone of his oeuvre.

The words Belgian curator Luk Lambrecht penned in 2009 in reference to Uslé’s work remain pertinent today: “Although recognisable, Juan’s painting is far from predictable. (…) In terms of planning, these compositions have been built using vertical or horizontal strips/lines, embracing time as a sweet, oscillating undulation on the surface of a calm sea and conveying the allusion that change and transformation — however minimal — are the very essence of life”.

Further, Andrea Soto Calderón puts forward the following in an essay written for the exhibition catalogue: “Working with the limits of space to not perceive them as limits. A place to sleep, dream, love and desire is also a place where images emerge, a place to feel your way into a work, where sketches of images are formed to gaze. This gesture entails the taking-up of a position, a commitment to treatment in the place where his images grow and gestate, yet also a place of rigour with the matter of dreams”.