Publications

The catalogue Juan Uslé. Ese barco en la montaña is published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition that the Museo Reina Sofía dedicates to the forty-year career of Juan Uslé (Santander, 1954), one of Spain’s most internationally acclaimed painters. Featuring more than one hundred reproduced works, this monograph on the artist is the most comprehensive to date.

The publication includes a series of essays that delve into the complexity of Uslé’s work. Ángel Calvo Ulloa, the exhibition’s curator, offers a new interpretation of the artist’s practice through the echoes of his own history — such as the shipwreck of the vessel Elorrio in 1960, a childhood memory; his arrival in New York in the 1980s; or the recurring presence of water that, between dream and memory, permeates his painting. Filmmaker and theorist Érik Bullot examines the influence of the technical apparatus of cinema — celluloid, light projection, and visual fluidity — on the artist’s painting. Philosopher Andrea Soto Calderón proposes a renewed approach to pictorial abstraction by studying Uslé’s work from the perspective of sensory experience, situating his painting at the opposite extreme of the visual saturation of the contemporary world. The catalogue concludes with a previously unpublished conversation held between 2000 and 2003 between Uslé and critic and poet Kevin Power.