Juan Uslé Artist for 2014 Roland Garros

                        © Design : Juan Uslé  – Galerie Lelong / FFT 2014 Juan Uslé is a Spanish artist who splits his time between his house/artist’s atelier in Saro en Cantabrie in Spain and New York City. Already a celebrated contemporary artist around the world, 2014 offers his artistic career a stunning highlight: He has been chosen as the featured artist for “Roland Garros” for 2014. His poster, which you see here, will grace the French Tennis Open’s events, official public communiqués and will hang proudly in the Galerie Lelong at the French Federation of Tennis Museum in Paris. For this Spanish artist, tennis, as a sport, retains an essence of dueling sportsmen emanating from its Roman-Greek heritage of antiquity. This collection of his work of art captures this sense of the era of antiquity’s celebrated Man vs. Man battles where the title of hero was fought for and won. Paradoxically, at the same time, Uslé wanted to capture the integral civility as well as the drama the sport of tennis imposes on these heroic battles between would-be heros. « The players confront one another physically but remain separate, apart.  They don’t hit one another or ever directly have any physical contact. Each is civilized : The human being keeps his animal nature guarded well within himself. This is what gives the sport its complexity. I also wanted to capture the essence of the game : the net, the ball, the action. I had no desire to represent a person. That’s not my language. I wanted to speak of the drama of the sport, the mystery, the matches, the winning scores, the heroism of the players, » explains the artist. Juan Uslé’s works feature in numerous European museums including : the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Tate Modernin London, the Irish Museum in Dublin, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart and Munich, as well as being present in America. Juan Uslé is the sixth Spanish artist to deliver an original work of art, imagined around the theme of a tennis match, to the French Federation of Tennis created uniquely for the prestigious annual event, Roland Garros, the French Tennis Open. He follows Joan Miro (1991), Antoni Tapies (2000) and Jaume Plensa (2005) for this lofty distinction. This Spring an extensive retrospective of Usle’s work titled « Sone que te revelabas » will be shown at the Bonn Museum in Germany. Following that, the exhibition will be installed in Spain’s Musée Centro Galego de Arte Contemporanea in Saint-Jacques-de-Compostelle.