There is a period after the word. That is the first thing I notice. Not the word itself — meh — but the full stop that follows it, small and centered on a dark shirt, lowercase, barely wider than a thumbnail. The native garment preview shows very small, centered lowercase meh. lettering on a dark […]
The pumpkin on this shirt is not menacing. It has two round eyes, a heart-shaped nose, and a smiling mouth, printed in orange on a standard tee under the title Cute Kids Jack O Lantern Face Halloween Costume Pumpkin. That is the whole design. No dripping fangs, no stitched scar, no glowing interior. Just a […]
Four root vegetables, arranged in a loose ring, all smiling. A carrot, a radish, a beet, an onion. Their roots hang down into a band of soil that runs beneath the lettering like a cross-section cut through a garden bed. Around them, in capitals that follow the curve of the group, the words: LET’S ROOT […]
On 3 February 1937, from Valladolid, the governor general of the Junta Técnica de Estado — the first governing body of the rebel faction — issued a circular order to every civil governor in Spain: suspend the carnival festivities. The order came from Luis Valdes Cabanillas, a veteran military man, and it landed just as […]
Walk into the Fundación MAPFRE rooms in Madrid or Barcelona and you are walking into an insurance company’s cultural programme. Not a museum, not a ministry, not a university. A foundation funded by MAPFRE, the Spanish insurance group whose investor page reports €16,127 million in premiums, a 92.8% non-life combined ratio, a 208.8% solvency ratio […]
The Bull That Won’t Die: A Forensic Look at Bullfighting Imagery in Contemporary Spanish Art Bullfighting imagery is not a relic. It is a working visual technology in contemporary Spanish art, and it keeps showing up in places where you would least expect it: in state-funded museum retrospectives, in the branding of Andalusian tourism campaigns, […]
The mimeograph in the corner of the Madrid basement doesn’t look like much. The drum is stained purple-black — that ink never quite washes off skin, I can tell you that from experience — and the hand-crank has a wobble that says this machine has printed far more than it was built to print. But […]
Bullfighting imagery is not a relic. It is a live wire running through Spanish contemporary art, carrying the voltage of colonial nostalgia, state subsidy, gendered violence, and the unresolved question of what “Spanish identity” is supposed to mean after empire. When I say bullfighting imagery, I mean the whole visual apparatus: the traje de luces, […]
Bullfighting imagery is not a relic. It is a live wire running through contemporary Spanish art, crackling with unresolved arguments about national identity, colonial nostalgia, animal suffering, and the performance of masculinity. In the work of painters, printmakers, street artists, and zine makers, the bull, the matador, the banderillas, and the blood-soaked sand of the […]
The bull is not a metaphor. It is a wound that Spanish visual culture keeps reopening, a national brand burned into the retina from Goya to Instagram. When I say bullfighting imagery persists in contemporary Spanish art, I mean something more specific than nostalgia or kitsch. I mean the tauromaquia apparatus—the suit of lights, the […]