Juan Uslé’s Childhood Shipwrecks

Hyperallergic reviews “Ese barco en la montaña (That Ship on the Mountain),” a Juan Uslé retrospective at Madrid’s Museo Reina Sofía featuring around 100 works spanning four decades. Curated by Ángel Calvo Ulloa, the exhibition takes as its starting point the December 1960 shipwreck of the Elorrio off Spain’s Cantabrian coast, an event Uslé witnessed as a child, and it includes early works from the 1980s shaped by marine themes and memory. The show also traces Uslé’s reinvention after moving to New York City in the late 1980s, highlighting how the city’s waterways and energy informed his abstract painting. Uslé discussed this transition at a press preview on November 25, 2025, describing New York as feeling like home and likening its energy to a “great, calm sea.”

Read the full article at Hyperallergic