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 plaza keep returning, not as folklore but as a site of conflict. This matters for anyone looking at Iberian visual culture through a decolonial lens, because the bullfight is one of Spain’s most successful cultural exports and one of its most violent internal myths. It is a spectacle that turns death into choreography, and contemporary artists keep refusing to look away.
I am writing this from a position of suspicion toward the official story. The official story says bullfighting is either timeless heritage or outdated cruelty. Contemporary Spanish art complicates both positions. It shows us that the bullfight is a visual language, a set of gestures and materials that can be quoted, inverted, mocked, mourned, and re-politicized. The persistence of bullfighting imagery is not nostalgia. It is an argument about what Spain wants to remember and what it wants to forget.
The Plaza as a Colonial Echo
To understand why the bull keeps appearing in contemporary Spanish art, you have to understand that the bullring is not a neutral stage. The modern corrida de toros took its current form in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exactly when Spain was losing its American colonies and consolidating a national identity built on blood, honor, and spectacle. The bullfight became a way to perform Spanishness at home and abroad. It was exported to Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela, where it fused with local traditions and colonial power structures. When contemporary artists in Madrid, Seville, or Barcelona return to the bullfight, they are often returning to that colonial echo, whether they say so or not.
One of the clearest examples is the work of Pilar Albarracín, whose performances and installations have spent decades dismantling Andalusian clichés. In pieces like Lunares and her series of embroidered bullfighter capes, Albarracín takes the traje de luces, the suit of lights, and turns it into a costume that can be worn by a woman, a migrant, a queer body, or a corpse. The bullfighter’s costume is one of the most rigidly gendered garments in Spanish culture. Albarracín’s intervention is not decorative. It is a direct attack on the idea that the bullfight represents a natural or eternal Spanish essence. Her work says: this is a costume, and costumes can be changed.
Street-level political art has taken this further. In Valencia and Barcelona, anti-bullfighting collectives have used the iconography of the bullring in posters, stencils, and wheatpaste murals. The bull is sometimes shown as the victim, bleeding and confused, while the matador is reduced to a silhouette, a hollow sign of authority. These images circulate in zines and DIY print runs, far from the galleries and museums that sanitize the bullfight as heritage. The material culture of anti-bullfighting activism is itself a form of contemporary Spanish art, and it deserves to be treated as such.
Printmaking and the Reproducible Bull
Printmaking has always been the medium of political urgency, and bullfighting imagery has a long history in Spanish print culture. Goya’s La Tauromaquia is the unavoidable reference point. Those etchings, made between 1815 and 1816, are not celebrations of the bullfight. They are documents of violence, accident, and popular frenzy. Goya shows men gored, horses disemboweled, and crowds cheering at dismemberment. Contemporary printmakers who return to the bullfight are working in Goya’s shadow, and many of them know it.
In Madrid’s independent print studios, you can find limited-run etchings and screen prints that quote Goya directly, sometimes by reproducing a single figure from La Tauromaquia and placing it in a modern context: a shopping mall, a tourist plaza, a refugee camp. The effect is not pastiche. It is a way of asking whether the violence Goya documented has really ended or just changed costumes. The bullfight becomes a metaphor for other forms of institutionalized cruelty, from police violence to border enforcement. This is not a stretch. The bullring is a space where the state licenses killing as entertainment, and that logic has echoes elsewhere.
Zine makers in Barcelona and Bilbao have been especially direct. Small-run zines with titles like Torero Muerto and Sangre y Arena combine archival photographs of bullfights with contemporary news images of evictions, protests, and police charges. The visual rhyme is deliberate. The zine format matters here because it is cheap, fast, and outside the institutional art world. It does not wait for a curator’s permission. It circulates at book fairs, squats, and independent print festivals, building a counter-archive of Spanish violence.
The Bull as National Brand
There is another reason bullfighting imagery persists: the bull has been turned into a brand. The Osborne bull, that giant black silhouette standing on hillsides across Spain, began as an advertisement for a sherry company in 1956. It is now protected as cultural heritage. The bull appears on T-shirts, keychains, beach towels, and souvenir plates. It has been absorbed into the visual identity of Spanish tourism, even as actual bullfighting attendance declines and animal rights movements grow.
Contemporary artists have noticed this contradiction. The bull is everywhere, but the actual animal is absent. It has been replaced by a logo. In the work of Cristina Lucas, for example, the bull often appears as a hollow sign, a silhouette emptied of its body. Lucas’s video and installation pieces interrogate the gap between national symbols and lived reality. The bull becomes a way to talk about how Spain sells itself, to tourists and to itself, through images that have been drained of blood.
This is where the decolonial critique becomes unavoidable. The Osborne bull is a symbol of a Spain that still imagines itself as a land of passionate, authentic, pre-modern traditions. That image was built for foreign consumption, and it depends on erasing the violence of colonialism, the exploitation of migrant labor, and the ongoing struggle over regional identities. When contemporary artists use the bull, they are often using it against that brand. They are saying: you want a bull? Here is a bull. Here is what the bull actually costs.
Institutional Critique and the Museum Bull
Museums in Spain have a complicated relationship with bullfighting imagery. The Museo Taurino in Madrid and the Real Maestranza in Seville present the bullfight as art, history, and noble tradition. They display capes, swords, photographs, and taxidermied bulls. They frame the bullfight as a cultural achievement, not a blood sport. Contemporary artists who work with bullfighting imagery often have to negotiate this institutional framing, and some of them have made that negotiation the subject of their work.
One strategy is to refuse the museum’s terms. In 2019, the artist Eugenio Merino installed a hyperrealistic sculpture of a dying bull in a Madrid gallery, with a matador’s sword buried in its neck. The piece was not subtle. It forced viewers to stand close to the animal’s body, to see the blood, the open mouth, the glazed eye. Merino’s work is part of a broader movement of Spanish artists who use hyperrealism to break through the aestheticizing distance that museums often create. The bullfight is not a painting. It is a killing. The museum’s job, Merino’s work suggests, is to make that killing visible, not to frame it as heritage.
Other artists have taken a more archival approach. They collect photographs, posters, and objects from the history of bullfighting and recontextualize them in ways that expose the ideology underneath. This is close to the method of institutional critique: the museum is not a neutral container. It is a machine for producing meaning, and the meaning it produces about the bullfight is often reactionary. By pulling bullfighting imagery out of the museum and into the street, the zine, the print studio, and the protest poster, contemporary artists are challenging the museum’s authority to define what the bull means.
Regional Tensions and the Basque Exception
Bullfighting imagery does not mean the same thing everywhere in Spain. In the Basque Country and Catalonia, the bullfight has been banned or restricted, and the bull has become a symbol of Spanish centralism. In Bilbao and Barcelona, anti-bullfighting activism is often tied to broader struggles for regional autonomy and against Madrid’s cultural dominance. The bull, in this context, is not a neutral animal. It is a sign of the Spanish state.
Contemporary Basque artists have used this tension productively. The bull appears in Basque political posters and murals as an invading force, a symbol of Castilian power. At the same time, some Basque artists have reclaimed the bull as a figure of resistance, drawing on the animal’s strength and stubbornness. This double meaning is not a contradiction. It is a sign of how deeply bullfighting imagery is embedded in Spanish political conflict. The bull can be the oppressor or the oppressed, depending on who is holding the image.
In Catalonia, the ban on bullfighting in 2011 was a political act as much as an animal rights victory. It was a way of saying that Catalonia would not be defined by Madrid’s version of Spanishness. Contemporary Catalan artists have continued to use bullfighting imagery, but often in a critical or elegiac mode. The bullfight appears as a ghost, a memory of a Spain that is passing away. This is not nostalgia. It is a way of marking distance from a national myth that many Catalans no longer recognize as their own.
Material Culture: Capes, Swords, and Blood
One of the most powerful ways contemporary Spanish artists use bullfighting imagery is through its material culture. The traje de luces, the montera, the estoque, the banderillas, the capote: these objects carry enormous symbolic weight. They are not just props. They are instruments of a ritualized killing. When artists take these objects out of the bullring and place them in a gallery, a street, or a zine, they change their meaning. The object becomes evidence.
In Seville, a group of young artists has been producing embroidered textiles that reproduce the patterns of the traje de luces but replace the gold and silver thread with red thread, the color of blood. The pieces are beautiful and disturbing. They hang in galleries like liturgical vestments, but they are vestments for a sacrifice. The embroidery is meticulous, almost obsessive, and that obsessiveness is part of the point. The bullfight is a ritual of extreme precision, and the artists are asking what that precision is for.
Zines and DIY publications have been especially effective at circulating these material critiques. A zine can include a photograph of a bullfighter’s sword next to a photograph of a police baton, or a diagram of the bullfight’s stages next to a diagram of a border checkpoint. The visual argument is immediate and does not require a curator’s explanation. This is street-level political art in its most direct form: images that travel, that get photocopied, that get pasted on walls, that get handed out at protests.
Why This Matters for Decolonial Visual Culture
The persistence of bullfighting imagery in contemporary Spanish art is not a curiosity. It is a symptom of a deeper problem: Spain has never fully confronted the violence at the heart of its national identity. The bullfight is one of the places where that violence is most visible, most ritualized, and most defended. When contemporary artists return to the bullfight, they are returning to the scene of the crime. They are asking who gets to be the bull and who gets to be the matador, and they are refusing to accept the official answer.
For a blog focused on Iberian and Latin American visual culture, this topic is essential. The bullfight was exported to Latin America as part of the colonial project. It became a symbol of Spanish power and a site of local resistance. In Mexico, Peru, and Colombia, bullfighting imagery has its own complex history, and contemporary Latin American artists have used it to talk about everything from state violence to indigenous rights. The bull is a transatlantic symbol, and its meaning changes depending on where you stand.
The next step for this blog is to trace that transatlantic journey. A follow-up article could examine how Mexican and Peruvian artists have reworked bullfighting imagery in the context of decolonial struggles. Another could look at the role of women artists in dismantling the bullfight’s masculine codes. A third could focus on the material culture of anti-bullfighting zines and the DIY networks that distribute them. The bull is not going away. Neither is the argument about what it means.
FAQ
Why do contemporary Spanish artists still use bullfighting imagery?
Because the bullfight remains a powerful and contested symbol of Spanish identity. Artists use it to critique nationalism, colonial history, gender roles, and institutional violence. The imagery is not nostalgia; it is a way of arguing with the past and the present.
Is bullfighting imagery always political in contemporary Spanish art?
Almost always, yes. Even when an artist uses the bull as a purely formal or aesthetic element, the symbol carries political weight in Spain. The bullfight is tied to debates about animal rights, regional autonomy, tourism, and national identity, so the imagery cannot be neutral.
How does printmaking and zine culture contribute to this conversation?
Printmaking and zines allow artists and activists to circulate bullfighting imagery outside museums and galleries. They are cheap, fast, and often explicitly political. Goya’s La Tauromaquia established the print as a medium for documenting the bullfight’s violence, and contemporary printmakers continue that tradition.
What is the connection between bullfighting imagery and colonialism?
The modern bullfight developed during Spain’s colonial period and was exported to Latin America as a symbol of Spanish power. Contemporary artists use bullfighting imagery to expose that colonial history and to question the national myths built on it.
Where can I see contemporary Spanish art that engages with bullfighting?
Look beyond the Museo Taurino. Independent galleries in Madrid, Barcelona, Bilbao, and Seville often show work that critiques the bullfight. Zine fairs, print festivals, and street art in anti-bullfighting cities are also key sites. Artists like Pilar Albarracín, Cristina Lucas, and Eugenio Merino are good starting points.