Galerie Lelong is pleased to present an exhibition devoted to Juan Uslé’s drawings at the bookshop. This presentation follows on from "Un viaje paralelo", an exhibition at the Torre de Don Borja in Santillana del Mar, where more than two hundred small-format works revealed a more intimate dimension of the artist’s practice: that of the "Notas". These notes, kinds of visual fragment that have accompanied his artistic process for more than thirty-five years, give rise to the rhythms, intuitions and lights that permeate all of his paintings.
Through repetition and variation, each page covered with ink, graphite or watercolour becomes a space for breathing and poetic intensity. Created at night in New York or in the silence of his studios in Saro, near Santander, these drawings deepen the connection between the artist and the landscapes that surround him. They bear witness to the inner listening that characterises his entire body of work: a world in which abstraction and figuration rub shoulders, horizons vibrate, colours appear and then disappear. The exhibition is accompanied by a recent publication by La Fábrica, which brings together a significant collection of these works on paper and highlights their fundamental role in Juan Uslé’s creative process.
Born in 1954 in Santander, Spain, Juan Uslé is a leading contemporary painter. He is currently the subject of a retrospective at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, which runs until April 20th, 2026. Juan Uslé’s work is featured in numerous collections, including the Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Colección Fundación “la Caixa,” Barcelona; the IMMA, Dublin; the MACBA, Barcelona; the MNAM – Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Musée d’Art Contemporain du Luxembourg; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; the Reina Sofía Museum, Madrid; the Serralves Museum, Porto; the SMAK, Ghent; and the Tate Modern, London. In 2021, Galerie Lelong published a collection of interviews in French, La peinture dans son temps.
