Juan Uslé and the New York Experience
Round-Table Discussion with Juan Uslé, Vicky Civera, Txomin Badiola, Octavio Zaya and Ángel Calvo Ulloa
Juan Uslé, Mi-Mon (Miró versus Mondrian), 1992
Framed inside the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, this round-table discussion puts forward a journey towards a decisive time and place: New York in the 1980s and 1990s, the setting for an artistic vibrancy whose influence would run deep among an entire generation of artists from Spain who in the US city encountered fertile, chaotic anddemanding ground full of possibility. Such was the case with Juan Uslé, who in January 1987 crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the Elorrio Ship — the sinking of which in 1960 off the coast of Langre (Cantabria) remained etched in the artist’s mind — to take up residence in New York.
The conversation, moderated by the show’s curator, Ángel Calvo Ulloa, brings together Juan Uslé, Vicky Civera, Txomin Badiola and Octavio Zaya, four voices who experienced this time from different yet complementary perspectives. Their dialogue reconstructs the experience of arriving in an alien context and explores the ways in which these artistic figures created ties and communities in an environment crossed by creative intensity and tensions of cultural change.
Furthermore, it approaches the relationship with the Museo Reina Sofía, which in those years was beginning to redefine its role within the international artistic ecosystem. The round-table prompts reflection on how the Spanish scene and Spain’s museum institutions were perceived from the distance of New York, recovering, through orality, a key episode in the history of Spanish art.
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Collaboration
illycaffèParticipants
Txomin Badiola
(Bilbao, 1957) is an artist. He studied at the Bilbao Faculty of Arts, where he also served as a lecturer from 1982 to 1988. Between 1988 and 1989 he lived in London, and from 1990 to 1998 in New York. He also ran, with Ángel Bados, two courses at Arteleku (San Sebastián) in 1994 and 1997, and curated Propósito Experimental (Experimental Intent, Madrid, Barcelona and Bilbao, 1988–1989), an anthological exhibition on the sculptor Oteiza, and, with Margit Rowell, Oteiza. Mito y modernidad (Oteiza. Myth and Modernity, 2005) for the Museo Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museo Reina Sofía. Badiola has also exhibited work at various national and overseas galleries and institutions, with major retrospectives held at the Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao (2002), the Musée d'Art Moderne de Saint Etienne-Metropole in France (2007) and the Museo Reina Sofia (2016–2017). He is the author of the Catálogo razonado de escultura de Jorge Oteiza ([The Catalogue Raisonné of the Sculpture of Jorge Oteiza], FMO and Nerea, 2015), and as a fiction writer his books include Malformalismo (Caniche, 2019) and the novels El curador (Caniche) and Mamuk (Acantilado) in 2025.
Ángel Calvo Ulloa
(Lalín, 1984) is a curator and writer. He holds a degree in Art History from the University of Santiago de Compostela (USC) and an MA in Contemporary Art: Creation and Research from the University of Vigo (UVigo). He has developed his work withdifferent national and overseas institutions and recently co-curated O Fantasma da Liberdade / Anozero Bienal de Coimbra 2024, with Marta Mestre. His other recent curatorial projects most notably include; ¿Adónde irá el pájaro que no vuele?, at La Casa Encendida (Madrid); Humores y Espesores, on Rodríguez-Méndez, at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) (Móstoles, Madrid); El sueño de la cólcedra, on Teresa Lanceta, at the Museo Patio Herreriano (Valladolid); Siron Franco: Pensamento insubordinado (Trabalhos, 1961-2023), at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Goiás (MAC Goiás) [Goiânia, Brazil]; Anidar en el gesto: unas estanterías de Alberto, at the Fundación Cerezales Antonio y Cinia (Cerezales del Condado, León); Autoconstrucción. Piezas sueltas. Juego y experiencia, on Antonio Ballester Moreno, at Artium (Vitoria-Gasteiz); Complexo Colosso, at the Centro Internacional das Artes José de Guimarães (CIAJG) [Guimarães, Portugal]; and, with Nuria Enguita, Habitación. El Archivo F.X., las chekas psicotécnicas de Laurencic y la función del arte, on Pedro G. Romero, at the Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo (CA2M) (Móstoles, Madrid), the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) [Barcelona] and the Centro Cultural La Nau (Valencia). In 2020 he published, with Juan Canela, the book Desde lo curatorial. Conversaciones, experiencias y afectos, within the Consonni Paper Collection.
Victoria Civera
(Port de Sagunt, 1955) is an artist who lives and works between New York and Saro (Cantabria). Her work is articulated as a terrain of intimate exploration, where matter, form and memory interweave in a personal visual language. After training at the San Carlos Advanced School of Fine Art in Valencia, she embarked upon large-scale gestural paintings which, after she moved to New York, became more introspective and materialbased. Civera’s practice spans painting, sculpture and installation, incorporating women, domesticity and the body as fields of reflection on identity and fragility. Since the 1990s, she has worked rigorously with three-dimensional works, and has been the subject of solo shows in the Museo Reina Sofía’s Espacio Uno and at the Institut Valencià d'Art Modern (IVAM),the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (CAC Málaga) and the Museo Patio Herreriano de Arte Contemporáneo Español in Valladolid, as well as in art galleries in Europe and the USA.
Juan Uslé
(Santander, 1954) is one of Spain’s foremost contemporary painters internationally. He has lived between New York and Saro (Cantabria) since 1987. Usléhas participated at major art events such as the Venice Biennale (2005), Documenta 9 (1992), the Istanbul Biennial (1992) and the São Paulo Biennial (1985), and has held solo shows at Bombas Gens Centre d’Art de Valencia (2021); Kunstmuseum Bonn (2014); the Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea in Santiago de Compostela (2013); Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK) in Gent (2004); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) in Dublin (2004); the Fundación Botín in Santander (2004); the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid (2003); the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (1996); and the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern (IVAM) in Valencia (1996), among others. His work is part of numerous international public and private collections, for instance: The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin; the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA); the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Luxembourg; the Museo Guggenheim, Bilbao; the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; the Museu Serralves, Porto; the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (SMAK), Gent; and Tate Modern, London. In 2002, his work and career were honoured with the National Prize for Plastic Arts, awarded by Spain’s Ministry of Culture.
Octavio Zaya
(Las Palmas, 1954) is an independent curator who has lived in the Canary Islands since 2022 after living in the USA for forty-four years. He recently participated in organising Sharjah Biennial 15 (United Arab Emirates, 2023) and has curated projects such as Ríos intermitentes on Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons for the 13th Havana Biennial (2019) and the retrospective Luis Camnitzer. Hospice of Failed Utopias held in the Museo Reina Sofía (2018–2019). Other notable exhibitions in his curatorial career include Lara Almarcegui’s participation in the Spanish Pavilion at the 55th Venice Biennale; Shirin Neshat. Escrito sobre el cuerpo (Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, 2013) Yinka Shonibare. El futuro del pasado (Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid, 2011); and Versions of the South: Five Proposals around Art in the Americas. Beyond the Document (Museo Reina Sofía, 2000). He also curated the First Johannesburg Biennial (1995) and was co-curator of documenta 11 Kassel (2002) and the main exhibition at the Second Johannesburg Biennial (1997), as well as being a member of the curatorial team of In/Sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present (Museo Guggenheim in New York,1997), director of the magazine Atlántica (2000–2018), anexternal curator and advisor at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León (MUSAC, León, 2005–2012) and co-director of the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Huarte (2007–2009). At present, he is working on creating a Decolonial Archive for the Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (TEA) and is a member of the editorial board of the Nka Journal of Contemporary African Art and on the advisory boards of the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires (MALBA), the Museo Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga (MUCAC) and Performa (New York).
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![Dias & Riedweg, Casulo [Crisálida], 2019, película](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/desafios-cine-2.png.webp)
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Inside the framework of The Collection Screened, a programme rooted in the institution’s film, video and moving image holdings, the Museo invites Laura Baigorri, one of the leading specialists in video art, to approach specific aspects related to identity, self-representation and the body within the Museo’s audiovisual collection since the 1990s. The session recovers paradigmatic performances, from three successive decades, crossed by the indisputable expression of gender; that is, mediated by the confronted acts of feminisms and the queer paradigms of culture.
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Juan Uslé and the New York Experience
15 ABR 2026
Framed inside the exhibition Juan Uslé. That Ship on the Mountain, this round-table discussion puts forward a journey towards a decisive time and place: New York in the 1980s and 1990s, the setting for an artistic vibrancy whose influence would run deep among an entire generation of artists from Spain who in the US city encountered fertile, chaotic anddemanding ground full of possibility. Such was the case with Juan Uslé, who in January 1987 crossed the Atlantic in the opposite direction to the Elorrio Ship — the sinking of which in 1960 off the coast of Langre (Cantabria) remained etched in the artist’s mind — to take up residence in New York.
The conversation, moderated by the show’s curator, Ángel Calvo Ulloa, brings together Juan Uslé, Vicky Civera, Txomin Badiola and Octavio Zaya, four voices who experienced this time from different yet complementary perspectives. Their dialogue reconstructs the experience of arriving in an alien context and explores the ways in which these artistic figures created ties and communities in an environment crossed by creative intensity and tensions of cultural change.
Furthermore, it approaches the relationship with the Museo Reina Sofía, which in those years was beginning to redefine its role within the international artistic ecosystem. The round-table prompts reflection on how the Spanish scene and Spain’s museum institutions were perceived from the distance of New York, recovering, through orality, a key episode in the history of Spanish art.