Born in 1954 in Santander, Juan Uslé comes from one of the flemish families who arrived in Cantabria to work at the Real Fábrica de Artillería de la Cavada. He moves to Valencia in 1973 to study Fine Arts at Escola Superior de Sant Carles and during his formation he starts to collaborate with the artist Victoria Civera. After finishing his degree, he focused his work on painting, receiving in 1980 the scholarship for Artistas Jóvenes in 1980 and New Expressive Forms Research scholarship two years later, both of Spain’s Ministerio de Cultura. Afterwards, in 1986, he moves to New York to increase his artistic training thanks to a scholarship of Comité Conjunto Hispano-Norteamericano.

We can observe an intellectual and sensorial feeling of pleasure in his work, where thinking, action and emotion concepts are introduced in a clever and sensitive game. The artist is interested in painting, photography and graphic work, inquiring into the potential of abstraction, but without shunning his social commitment, implicit in many of his works. Although during the eighties his work focuses on the American abstract expressionism of artists such as Willem de Kooning, towards the nineties he mutates to more personal territories where the expressionist drive is losing prominence. Intense and non-naturalistic colors emerge, presenting us with a visual imaginary where geometry and gesture, sobriety and baroque, dynamism and immobility alternate.

His work starts to become more visible through Museo Municipal de Bellas Artes of Santander and Ruiz Castillo Gallery in Madrid at early eighties, as well as Galería del Palau in Valencia. But his collaboration with Galeria Montenegro in Madrid is the turning point, and the relationship between the artist and the gallery will continue over the years. In turn, his work leaves the Spanish State and is shown in spaces such as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, individually, or Galerie 121 in Antwerp and Sao Paulo Biennial. The nineties make his work travel around Europe and United States, presenting a retrospective at IVAM in 1996. Since then, he has continued alternating his exhibitions between Spain, Europe and United States.