THE BIENNALE, THEN AND STILL
In dialogue with Guillermo Romero Parra
FVTVRIST Magazine // Text by Anna S.
14 May 2026
Days after the Venice Biennale opens, Guillermo Romero Parra is in Madrid preparing the gallery's next exhibition, Ugo Mulas. The Biennale and the Image, which inaugurates on May 14. Mulas first photographed the Biennale in the 1960s, when the event was still a contested terrain and photography was fighting to be read as a critical language. We met to talk about that moment, about why his gaze still feels necessary now, and about what a Madrid exhibition can say about Venice while Venice is already underway.
Current Show: Ugo Mulas. The Biennale and the Image.
Location: Parra & Romero, Madrid.
Dates: 14 May – 23 July 2026.
UGO MULAS
Mostra galleggiante della Galleria Iris Clert, 1964
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
UGO MULAS
Trasporto di Express di Robert Rauschenberg, 1964
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
You're closing the Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace exhibition and opening the Ugo Mulas one. Two very different relationships with the photographic image: one constructed, staged, deeply theoretical; the other a gaze embedded inside the system of art itself. Is there a programmatic line connecting them for you, or is it precisely the contrast that interests you?
I think there is a very clear line, even if at first glance they seem like very different exhibitions. In both cases photography does not appear as a simple recording tool, but as a form of thought. Jeff Wall and Ian Wallace work from the construction of the image, from the awareness that every image is organised, composed, charged with historical and conceptual references. Ugo Mulas, although he starts from a more direct relationship with the event, is not simply documenting what happens either. He is interpreting a system: art, the artists, the pavilions, the encounters, the hierarchies, the gestures.
What interests me is precisely that tension. With Wall and Wallace the image is built from a very conscious position, almost architectural. With Mulas the construction seems more silent, but it is there. His gaze orders the world. In that sense, the two exhibitions speak about something central to us: the image not as evidence, but as critical space.
UGO MULAS
1/ Trasporto di Express di Robert Rauschenberg, 1964
2/ Joe Tilson, 1964
3/ Roy Lichtenstein e Leo Castelli, 1966
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
Before entering the exhibition, tell me about Ugo Mulas. What attracts you most about him as a figure, beyond the work? What kind of photographer, what kind of presence, was he inside those pavilions and those cafés?
I am very drawn to his position. Mulas does not seem like someone who arrives from outside to capture a scene. There is in him a very particular mix of discretion, intelligence and proximity. He is inside, but he does not allow himself to be entirely absorbed by the system. He has access to the artists, the critics, the dealers, the official moments and also the moments of waiting, of transit, of conversation. But he never turns that closeness into complacency.
I am interested in imagining him as an attentive, almost silent presence, capable of understanding that sometimes the truth of an era is not only in the finished work or in the pavilion, but at a café table, in a sidelong glance, in a movement, in a conversation before or after the event. He was a photographer with enormous cultural awareness. He did not photograph art from the distance of a reporter, but from the intuition of someone who understood that modern art was producing a new way of being in the world.
UGO MULAS
Rafael Canogar e Eduardo Chillida, 1958
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
UGO MULAS
Sala di Gerard Richter, 1972
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
Ugo Mulas arrives at the Biennale in the sixties, a decade in which photography was still fighting to be recognised as an artistic language in its own right. What do you think allowed him, at that precise moment, to do something nobody else was doing?
I think what allowed him to do it was a combination of historical intelligence and freedom. Mulas did not need to wait for photography to be fully legitimised by the art system in order to use it as a critical language. He already understood that photography could think, that it could build a reading of art and not merely preserve a visual memory of what had happened.
He also had something very important: he was in the right place, but he knew how to look beyond the place. The Biennale was an extraordinary stage, but he did not limit himself to photographing the stage. He photographed the entire apparatus. The works, yes, but also the artists, the pavilions, the relationships, the cafés, the movements, the waiting, the signs of power and of fragility. In that sense, he anticipated a very contemporary way of understanding art: not only as object, but as ecosystem.
The exhibition opens a few days after the opening of the Biennale, and Ugo Mulas's work is rooted in Venice. Why mount it now in Madrid?
Precisely because Mulas's gaze is once again very necessary now. The Biennale continues to be one of the great symbolic stages of contemporary art, but it is also a place saturated with images, with communication, with speed, with representation. Returning to Mulas today allows us to slow down that experience and ask ourselves what it really means to look at art.
Mounting it in Madrid interested us because it generates a fertile distance. We are not in Venice, but Venice appears as image, as myth, as system and as memory. The exhibition allows us to bring that history into another context and open a conversation about how the narratives of art are constructed. Also, for Parra & Romero it was important to present Mulas not from nostalgia, but from a living reading. Not as someone who photographed an era, but as someone who still helps us understand our own.
The curatorial text is explicit in renouncing rigid hierarchies and chronological sequence. For an artist so historically situated, that's a strong decision. What were you liberating the work from?
From a reading that was too documentary. When an artist is so tied to an era, there is always the risk of turning him into a witness of something that has already passed. And Mulas is much more than that. Chronology is useful, but it can also reduce the complexity of a gaze. In this exhibition we wanted the images to breathe in another way, to function not only as historical chapters, but as constellations.
Liberating the work from a strict sequence allows you to see deeper connections: between the pavilion and the café, between the artist and the dealer, between the work and the architecture, between the official scene and the peripheral. The history of course is still there, but we did not want it to be a closed line. We wanted the viewer to be able to enter a visual and mental field, almost as if walking through the Biennale from within.
FOR PARRA & ROMERO IT WAS IMPORTANT TO PRESENT MULAS NOT FROM NOSTALGIA, BUT FROM A LIVING READING. SOMEONE WHO STILL HELPS US UNDERSTAND OUR OWN ERA.
The selection includes encounters in cafés, journeys, waits, peripheral scenes. In most retrospectives these tend to be relegated to behind-the-scenes. What argument were you building by giving them the same weight as the pavilions?
For me those images are not peripheral. They are central to understanding how the art system works. The Biennale does not happen only in the pavilions. It also happens in the journeys, in the conversations, in the informal relationships, in the moments of waiting, in the cafés, in the decisions taken before or after the public sees an exhibition. Mulas understood something fundamental: art is not built only in the exhibition space, but also in a network of gestures, ties, movements and presences. To give those scenes equal weight is to recognise that history is also produced there. Sometimes a conversation in a café contains as much information about an era as an institutional room.
You describe Ugo Mulas as someone who does not record a scene, but interprets it, orders it, gives it form. Take me to a concrete image in the exhibition where, for you, that is happening most clearly.
There is one image that interests me especially: Roy Lichtenstein and Leo Castelli at the Venice Biennale, in 1966. It could be read simply as the encounter between a fundamental Pop Art artist and his gallerist, but Mulas does something more complex. The image condenses a historical moment in which American art is occupying a central position in Europe, and in which the figure of the gallerist, the artist and the institution begin to form a new structure of cultural power. It is not just a portrait. It is almost an image of the system in operation. There is the artist, there is the mediator, there is the Biennale as stage of legitimation, there is Venice as historical theatre. Mulas does not underline anything, does not force the reading, but he organises all those elements in such a way that the image becomes a synthesis of an era.
What does it mean today for an artist to be part of the Venice Biennale? Is it still an act of consecration, or has it become something else?
It is still a form of consecration, without a doubt, but no longer only in the classical sense. Today the Biennale is also a platform of global visibility, a space of institutional, political and discursive positioning. For an artist it can mean many things: recognition, pressure, international exposure, entry into certain conversations, but also the risk of being absorbed by a very large machinery.
I am interested in thinking that the Biennale no longer consecrates only individual careers, but narratives. It decides which subjects, which geographies, which languages and which urgencies enter the centre of the conversation. That is why it remains so important. Not only for who exhibits, but for what kind of world each edition proposes.
UGO MULAS
Leo Castelli e Claes Oldenburg, 1964
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
Ugo Mulas photographed the Biennale in the sixties, at a moment when art was being radically redefined, and the Biennale itself was a contested terrain, think of '68. What do you think has changed most profoundly between that scene and today's? And what, surprisingly, remains the same?
Scale, speed and media awareness have changed. Today everything happens within an immediate circulation of images. The Biennale is no longer only a physical event; it is also a global production of contents, narratives, communiqués, publications, social media, positionings. The image no longer comes after the event. Often the event seems to be conceived in order to become an image.
But there is something that remains surprisingly the same: the need for legitimation. The artists, the countries, the galleries, the institutions, all continue to look to Venice for a form of historical inscription. The same tensions also still exist between centre and periphery, between visibility and depth, between politics and market, between aesthetic experience and institutional narrative. Mulas reminds us that those tensions are not new. What changes is the speed at which we see them.
If Ugo Mulas were photographing the 2026 edition, what do you think he would capture that we can no longer see?
I think he would capture the moments of disconnection inside the hyperconnection. I do not think he would stay only with the most spectacular installations or the most immediately recognisable images. He would surely look toward the margins: the teams setting up, the artists waiting, the phones in hands, the silences between two openings, the gestures of tiredness, the social choreographies, the instants in which the great cultural machinery lets its fragility show. Mulas had an enormous capacity to detect what an era says without knowing it is saying it. Today he would probably photograph that mixture of intensity, anxiety, representation and desire to belong that runs through the art world. He would see what we, by being too immersed in the speed, can no longer manage to look at.
This exhibition has the scale of a museum, a demanding curatorial reading, the will for long-term institutional conversation. How do you understand the role of a gallery like Parra & Romero today in relation to the institution?
I think a gallery should not limit itself to operating as a commercial space. Of course, the sale is fundamental to sustaining the artists, the projects and the structure, but a gallery with ambition has to produce context. It has to be able to investigate, to take risks, to build genealogies, to open conversations that do not depend solely on the immediacy of the market.
For me, Parra & Romero has always tried to occupy that place: a gallery that works with historical rigour, with sensitivity toward the space, with the will to generate thought. It is not a question of replacing the institution, but of engaging in dialogue with it from another kind of agility. The gallery can move faster, can take on certain risks, can activate unexpected readings. And when that is done seriously, the commercial space can also become a space of knowledge.
UGO MULAS
1/ Sala di Jan Slothouber e William Gratsma, 1970
2/ Sala di Julio Le Parc, 1966
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
UGO MULAS
1/ Alik Cavaliere Davanti ad Australia di David Smith, 1958
2/ Guido Le Noci, Giuseppe Panda di Biumo, Pierre Restany, 1958
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
What would you like a viewer to take from Ugo Mulas to this year's Biennale? What does that gaze still teach the contemporary viewer?I would like them to take with them a slower, more conscious way of looking. That when they arrive in Venice they look not only at the works, but at everything that surrounds them. The routes, the encounters, the waits, the gestures, the architectures, the relationships of power, the apparently secondary moments. Mulas teaches us that art is not isolated from the world that produces it. His gaze remains profoundly contemporary because it forces us to distrust the fast image. It reminds us that to look is not to consume. To look is to order, to interpret, to take a position. And perhaps that is one of the most important lessons today: at a moment when we see too many images, Mulas returns to us the responsibility of really looking.
Current Show: Ugo Mulas. The Biennale and the Image.
Parra & Romero, Madrid.
14 May – 23 July 2026
UGO MULAS
Agnoldomenico Pica, Marco Valsecchi, Enzo Carli, signora Dell'Acqua, Carlo Scarpa, Gian Alberto dell'Acqua, 1960
© Courtesy of Ugo Mulas Estate and Parra & Romero.
About Ugo Mulas
Ugo Mulas was one of the most distinguished figures of twentieth-century photography. Born in Pozzolengo in 1928 and based in Milan from the late 1940s onward, he was largely self-taught, and his career unfolded in close contact with the artistic and cultural scene of postwar Italy. In the 1950s and 60s, while photography was still negotiating its entry into the artistic field, Mulas was already doing something else: reading the system that produced artists, works and events critically, from within. His portraits of Lucio Fontana, Marcel Duchamp and Alexander Calder, and his encounter with the New York School during the American trip of 1964 (Barnett Newman, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg), are not documents. They are interpretations. The Verifiche, made at the end of his life, constitute one of the most radical reflections ever made on the photographic medium from within the medium itself. And his work at the Venice Biennale, every edition of which he covered from 1954 to 1972, configures a unique cartography of twentieth-century art: not only of what was being exhibited, but of the entire apparatus, the pavilions, the corridors, the cafés, the waiting, all of Venice turned into stage set and laboratory. Mulas died in Milan in 1973, at the age of forty-four. His work has been revisited at Kunsthalle Basel (1971), Documenta VI Kassel (1977), Guggenheim New York (1994), Museo Reina Sofía Madrid (1996), Centre Pompidou Paris (2015), Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson Paris (2016), Le Stanze della Fotografia Venice (2023) and Palazzo Reale Milan (2024).
About Parra & Romero
Parra & Romero is one of the leading galleries on the contemporary Spanish scene, with spaces in Madrid and Ibiza. Founded by Guillermo Romero Parra, its programme has been built on a demanding premise: that a gallery can operate with the curatorial ambition, the historical rigour and the will for long-term conversation traditionally associated with the institutional space. Its catalogue combines key figures of international conceptual and minimalist art, Robert Barry, Jean-Marc Bustamante, Callum Innes, with sustained attention to contemporary practices that engage with that genealogy. Under Romero Parra's direction, the gallery has produced exhibitions of museum scale and editorial projects of depth, positioning itself as a critical interlocutor, and not merely a commercial one, within the art ecosystem.
About PHotoEspaña
Now in its 29th edition, PHotoEspaña runs from 13 May to 13 September 2026 under the title Volver a imaginar (Reimagining), with more than a hundred exhibitions unfolding across Madrid, Barcelona, Málaga, Santander, Seville, Valencia, Zaragoza, Alcalá de Henares, Gijón and Asturias, and extending internationally to Paraguay, with the Netherlands as guest country. This edition gathers some three hundred artists, sixty-five percent of them women, and concentrates its programme on the limits of the image, the questioning of the real, and the slow rewriting of photographic authority. Major exhibitions include Richard Avedon's In the American West at Fundación MAPFRE, Robert Frank's The Americans at Espacio Fundación Telefónica (presented in its entirety in Spain for the first time), and Viviane Sassen's LUX & UMBRA at Teatro Fernán Gómez.
Founded in 1998, PHotoEspaña was conceived with a precise institutional mission: to grant photography a central place within Spain's public museums and to make visible the work of its galleries. Across nearly three decades it has produced more than 1,300 exhibitions and shown over 3,000 artists, becoming Europe's most consequential photography festival and one of the principal frameworks through which the medium has been historically inscribed in the Iberian context.
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