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, the montera, the capote, the estoque, the sand, the blood, the bull’s ear, the plaza as architectural monument. I also mean the adjacent symbolic cluster: toros in advertising, banderillas in political cartoons, the bull as national brand, the matador as martyr, the bullring as museum. This matters for a blog about Iberian and Latin American visual culture because the bullfight is not only a Spanish problem. It is a transatlantic export, a colonial performance, and a recurring image in printmaking, zines, street art, and institutional critique from Madrid to Mexico City to Lima.
Contemporary Spanish artists have not stopped using this imagery. They have weaponized it, dissected it, and sometimes failed to escape it. The persistence is not accidental. It is structural. The bullfight remains protected by law as cultural heritage in Spain, subsidized by public money, and taught as a national tradition. Artists who work against that tradition often find themselves working inside its visual grammar anyway. That tension is exactly what I want to map here, with specific works, specific walls, specific prints, and specific silences.
The Plaza as Institutional Frame
Any serious discussion of bullfighting imagery in contemporary Spanish art has to start with the building itself. The plaza de toros is not a neutral venue. It is a circular architecture of spectatorship, designed for the controlled observation of animal death. When contemporary artists use the bullring as a motif, they are not just painting a pretty arena. They are invoking the history of public punishment, colonial spectacle, and the Catholic choreography of sacrifice.
Take the work of Pilar Albarracín, whose performances and installations have repeatedly used Andalusian folkloric imagery to expose the violence underneath Spanish femininity. In pieces like Lunares and her series of embroidered mantones, Albarracín does not always show the bull directly. But her use of the traje de flamenca, the polka dots, the fan, and the castanets places her work in the same symbolic field as the bullfight: a field where Spanishness is performed through the body of a woman or an animal, for the pleasure of an audience. The bullfight and the flamenco dress are cousins. Both are marketed as timeless Spanish tradition. Both are relatively modern inventions. Both depend on the idea that suffering can be beautiful if it is properly styled.
Albarracín’s 2004 video La Noche 1002 shows the artist dancing until she collapses. The exhaustion is real. The costume is real. The audience is implied. This is the same economy of display that keeps bullfighting alive: a body pushed past its limit, framed by tradition, consumed as spectacle. When I saw documentation of this work in a Madrid gallery, the room was silent except for the sound of her heels. That silence felt like the silence of a bullring before the paseíllo.
The Bull as National Brand
You cannot walk through Spain without seeing the Osborne bull. The black silhouette stands on hillsides along highways, originally an advertisement for Veterano brandy, now protected as cultural heritage. This is the clearest example of how bullfighting imagery persists even when the bullfight itself is questioned. The Osborne bull is not a fighting bull. It is a bull reduced to a logo, a national trademark, a silhouette emptied of blood. And yet it carries the same charge. It says: you are in Spain. It says: this land belongs to a certain idea of masculinity, rural power, and tradition.
Street artists have repeatedly intervened on the Osborne bull. Some have painted it pink. Some have added wings. Some have cut it down. Each intervention is a small act of visual criticism, but the silhouette remains. The persistence is the point. The bull as brand survives every attempt to deface it because the brand is bigger than any single image. This is what contemporary artists are up against: not just a painting or a poster, but a whole visual economy that reproduces the bull at every scale, from the keychain to the highway.
Printmaking and the Dissenting Bull
Printmaking has always been the medium of political dissent in Spain. Goya’s Tauromaquia is the unavoidable precedent: a series of etchings that documents the bullfight not as glory but as a catalog of wounds, falls, and deaths. Goya’s prints are not anti-bullfighting propaganda in the modern sense. They are something stranger: a record of the bullfight’s brutality that refuses to look away. Contemporary printmakers working in Spain inherit this ambiguity.
In the world of zines and DIY publishing, the bull appears constantly. Sometimes it is a symbol of resistance, as in anarchist graphics that use the bull to represent the Spanish people rising against authority. Sometimes it is a symbol of the state, as in anti-taurine posters that show the bull as victim and the matador as executioner. The same animal can mean both things. That semantic instability is exactly why the image persists. It is too useful to abandon.
I have handled zines from Madrid’s La Más Bella collective and from independent print fairs in Barcelona where the bull appears as a linocut, a screenprint, a rubber stamp. The best of these works do not try to resolve the contradiction. They print it. A linocut of a bull with a map of Spain cut into its flank. A screenprint of a matador whose capote is a Spanish flag. A zine page where the bull’s eye is a euro coin. These are not subtle images. They do not need to be. The bullfight itself is not subtle.
Goya’s Shadow and the Problem of Looking
Any contemporary Spanish artist who touches the bullfight has to deal with Goya. The Tauromaquia etchings, made between 1815 and 1816, are the visual foundation of the modern bullfight as an artistic subject. Goya shows the varas, the banderillas, the suerte de matar. He shows horses gored open. He shows men thrown into the air. He shows the crowd watching. The series is not a celebration. It is an autopsy.
Contemporary artists often quote Goya directly. The printmaker Julio Falagán, for example, works in a satirical register that owes a clear debt to Goya’s Caprichos and Desastres. When Falagán uses bullfighting imagery, it is usually to mock the pretensions of Spanish cultural nationalism. His prints are small, cheap, and distributed in editions that recall the popular print traditions of the nineteenth century. This is not museum art. It is art that circulates like a rumor.
The problem of looking is central. Goya forces the viewer to look at what the bullfight actually is: a sequence of wounds. Contemporary artists who use the bullfight as a decorative motif, as a nostalgic reference, as a fashion statement, are refusing to look. They are using the silhouette without the blood. That refusal is itself a political position, and it is the dominant one in Spanish visual culture. The bull appears on tote bags, on restaurant menus, on municipal logos. The blood is edited out. The persistence of bullfighting imagery in contemporary art is partly a persistence of this editing.
Institutional Critique and the Subsidized Spectacle
Bullfighting in Spain is not just a cultural practice. It is a subsidized one. Public money flows to bullfighting schools, bullring maintenance, and regional television broadcasts. The tauromaquia is legally protected as cultural heritage in several autonomous communities. This means that artists who critique bullfighting are not just critiquing a tradition. They are critiquing the state.
The artist Santiago Sierra has made a career out of institutional critique, often using paid performers to expose the violence of labor and the complicity of art institutions. Sierra has not, to my knowledge, made a bullfighting work. But his method is relevant. The bullfight is a labor relation: the matador is a worker, the bull is a worker, the audience is the employer. The plaza is a workplace. When contemporary artists ignore this, they treat the bullfight as a symbol rather than a system. The best institutional critique of bullfighting imagery comes from artists who understand the system: the breeding farms, the transport, the corrales, the slaughterhouse after the ring.
In 2010, Catalonia banned bullfighting. The ban was later overturned by the Constitutional Court in 2016, which ruled that bullfighting was part of the common cultural heritage and that the Catalan parliament had exceeded its powers. This legal battle was fought largely through images. Pro-ban posters showed the bull in agony. Anti-ban posters showed the bull as a noble emblem of Spanish unity. The visual war was as intense as the legal one. Contemporary artists in Catalonia and elsewhere have continued to produce work that intervenes in this debate, often using the language of the poster, the banner, and the street mural.
The Matador as Martyr, the Bull as Victim
One of the most persistent visual tropes is the matador as Christ figure. The traje de luces is already liturgical: gold embroidery, tight fitting, a costume that transforms the wearer into an icon. The matador’s posture, the raised sword, the moment of truth, all borrow from religious painting. Spanish Baroque art is full of martyrs in ecstasy. The matador is a secular martyr, and the bull is the instrument of his possible death.
This trope is so strong that even anti-bullfighting artists sometimes reproduce it. The bull becomes a Christ figure instead: the innocent victim, the sacrificial animal, the body that dies for the sins of the audience. The problem with this reversal is that it keeps the religious frame intact. It just changes the protagonist. A more radical visual critique would refuse the martyrdom narrative altogether. It would show the bullfight as a bureaucratic procedure, a slaughter with rules, a workplace accident. That is harder to paint. It is also more honest.
I remember seeing a small exhibition in a Valencia independent space where an artist had printed the official regulations of the corrida on butcher paper, in red ink, with the word “muerte” highlighted every time it appeared. The effect was devastating. The document did the work. The bullfight is not a mystery. It is a protocol.
Street-Level Observations: Walls, Stickers, and Silences
On the streets of Madrid, bullfighting imagery is everywhere and nowhere. The official posters for the San Isidro festival appear every spring, designed by contemporary artists and graphic designers. These posters are a fascinating subgenre. They are commissioned by the bullfighting industry, but they are made by artists who often have no particular commitment to the corrida. The result is a strange visual compromise: the bull is abstracted, the matador is stylized, the blood is absent. The poster becomes a design object, not a document.
In the Lavapiés neighborhood, anti-taurine stickers appear on lampposts and mailboxes. Some show a bull with the word “asesino” pointing at the matador. Some show a matador with the word “arte” crossed out. These stickers are small, cheap, and ephemeral. They are the opposite of the official posters. They do not try to be beautiful. They try to interrupt.
The silence is also telling. In many contemporary art galleries in Madrid, the bullfight is simply not discussed. It is too provincial, too touristy, too politically charged. The international art market prefers a different Spain: abstract, conceptual, European. The bullfight is left to the souvenir shops and the regional museums. This silence is a form of institutional critique in itself. It says: we do not want to look at this. But the bull is still there, on the highway, on the poster, on the keychain, in the law.
Transatlantic Echoes: The Bull in Latin American Visual Culture
The bullfight did not stay in Spain. It traveled to the Americas with the colonial project. Bullrings were built in Mexico City, Lima, Bogotá, and Caracas. The imagery of the bullfight merged with indigenous and African visual traditions, producing new forms: the torito in Mexican popular art, the bull in Peruvian retablo boxes, the bull as a figure in Afro-Caribbean carnival. When Latin American artists use the bull, they are often using a double image: the Spanish bull and the American bull, the colonizer’s animal and the people’s animal.
The Mexican printmaker José Guadalupe Posada used bulls and bullfighting imagery in his broadsides, often to satirize the pretensions of the Porfirian elite. Posada’s bulls are not noble. They are comic, clumsy, sometimes drunk. This is a decolonizing move: the bull loses its Spanish grandeur and becomes a local joke. Contemporary Latin American printmakers continue this tradition. The bull is a figure of power that can be mocked, shrunk, and reprinted.
For a blog focused on Iberian and Latin American visual culture, this transatlantic exchange is essential. The bullfight is not a Spanish export that Latin America passively received. It is a shared visual language that has been reworked, resisted, and re-signified across the Atlantic. The persistence of bullfighting imagery in contemporary Spanish art cannot be understood without this wider frame. The bull is always already a colonial animal.
What Comes Next: A Recurring Column and a Reader Question
This article is the first in what I intend to make a recurring column on “The Bull in the Room”: a series of close readings of bullfighting imagery in contemporary Iberian and Latin American art, printmaking, and street culture. Future pieces will look at the San Isidro poster archive, the use of the bull in feminist and queer Spanish art, the bullring as a site of memory in post-Franco Spain, and the transatlantic print networks that carried bull imagery from Seville to Oaxaca.
I also want to ask readers a question: What is the most disturbing or revealing use of bullfighting imagery you have seen in contemporary art, on the street, or in print? Send me a note through the contact page. I will read every response and may include your observation in a follow-up piece. This is not a rhetorical question. I want to know what you have seen, where you saw it, and what it did to you.
The bull never left. The question is whether we can look at it without flinching.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does bullfighting imagery still appear in contemporary Spanish art?
Because the bullfight is legally protected as cultural heritage in Spain, publicly subsidized, and deeply embedded in the visual branding of Spanish identity. Artists inherit this imagery from advertising, official posters, religious painting, and Goya’s print legacy. Even artists who oppose bullfighting often work inside its visual grammar because the symbols are so widely recognized.
Is all contemporary bullfighting imagery pro-bullfighting?
No. Much of it is critical, satirical, or ambivalent. Printmakers, street artists, and zine makers frequently use the bull and the matador to expose state violence, colonial nostalgia, and the commercialization of Spanish identity. The same image can function as a symbol of resistance or a symbol of oppression depending on context.
How does bullfighting imagery connect Spain and Latin America?
The bullfight was exported to the Americas during the colonial period, and bullrings were built across the region. Latin American artists reworked the imagery through local popular traditions, printmaking, and carnival. The bull became a double figure: the colonizer’s animal and the people’s animal. This transatlantic exchange is central to understanding the persistence of the image.
What role did Goya play in the artistic representation of bullfighting?
Goya’s Tauromaquia etchings, made between 1815 and 1816, are the foundational visual record of the modern bullfight. They document the violence of the corrida without romanticizing it. Contemporary artists who use bullfighting imagery must reckon with Goya’s precedent, either by quoting him directly or by refusing his unflinching gaze.