Walk into any white-walled gallery in Madrid or Barcelona and you might think you’ve escaped it. The sawdust, the sun-scorched sand, the metallic tang of adrenaline and iron. But look closer. That crimson slash across a canvas by Miquel Barceló? It’s not abstract expressionism throwing a tantrum. It’s a wound. Bullfighting, for all its dwindling ticket sales and ethical firestorms, refuses to vacate the Spanish artistic imagination. It hangs around—not as nostalgia, not as propaganda—but as a ghost that contemporary artists keep summoning, wrestling with, and reshaping into something raw.
I’m not here to romanticize the corrida. I grew up in Valencia, where the scent of orange blossom wages a losing battle against the stench of tradition. I’ve spent years oscillating between revulsion and a reluctant fascination. The bullfight is a ritual of death dressed as art, a choreographed slaughter that Spain clutches to its chest like a bloody heirloom. But pretending it’s vanished from our visual culture because the crowds have thinned or the kids prefer TikTok to banderillas is to miss the point entirely. The imagery hasn’t disappeared. It’s gone underground, into the nervous system of contemporary Spanish art, where it twitches and mutates.
The Horn as a Tool
Why won’t it die? Because the bullfight was never just a sport. It was a total aesthetic system. Goya knew this when he etched the Tauromaquia, and he knew its shadow side when he painted the Black Paintings. The bullfight contains everything: light and leather, blood and sand, the geometry of the cape, the architecture of a body under duress. It’s a ready-made vocabulary of forms. For a contemporary artist, ignoring it would be like a British painter ignoring the landscape. You can reject it, parody it, disembowel it—but you can’t pretend it isn’t there.
Take the Valencian artist Carmen Calvo. Her work doesn’t depict bullfighters. It doesn’t need to. She collects found objects—old photographs, ceramic fragments, rusted nails—and intervenes with violent precision. A vintage portrait gets a slab of red clay smeared across the mouth. A family snapshot is stabbed with a shard of mirror. The gesture is pure estoque: the final sword thrust. The materials are the debris of a culture that still organizes itself around spectacle and sacrifice. Calvo’s art is a forensic examination of what the bullring leaves behind in the collective psyche. She’s not painting the bull. She’s painting the silence after the bull is dragged out.
The Body as Arena
Then there’s the body. The bullfight is, at its core, a drama of the body—animal and human—pushed to its limit. Contemporary Spanish artists obsessed with corporeality can’t escape this inheritance. Santiago Sierra doesn’t need to mention bulls to evoke the corrida. His performances, where he pays marginalized people to endure physical ordeals—standing in a corner for hours, being tattooed, holding up a wall—are bullfights stripped of their sequins. The power dynamic is the same: a contract of suffering, witnessed by an audience that has paid to see something real at risk. The matador becomes the artist; the bull becomes the underpaid immigrant. The ring is the white cube. Sierra’s work is a mirror held up to the abattoir we pretend we’ve left behind.
Even artists who work in pure abstraction can’t shake the dust. Esteban Vicente, the great Spanish Abstract Expressionist who died in 2001, spent decades in New York making paintings that seem, at first glance, to have nothing to do with his homeland. But look at the way his fields of color collide—not blend, but collide. There’s a violence in the meeting of ochre and black, a sense of impact, of something tearing. Vicente himself admitted that the light and the death of the bullring were in his bones. You can’t unsee it once you know. The cape becomes a brushstroke. The blood becomes a glaze.
The Bull as Political Metaphor
Since the 2008 financial crisis, the bull has charged back into Spanish art with a vengeance—but it’s no longer the noble beast of yore. It’s a wounded, furious creature, often representing the Spanish people themselves. The artist Eugenio Merino made waves with his sculpture of a bull goring a banker, a direct inversion of the traditional power structure. The bull, for once, wins. Merino’s piece isn’t subtle, but it’s effective because it taps into a deep reservoir of collective imagery. Everyone in Spain knows what a bull’s horns look like. Everyone knows what it means when they’re lowered.
This political reclamation of the bullfight’s iconography is everywhere if you know where to look. Street artists in Barcelona paste up images of riot police as picadores, lancing not horses but the body politic. Feminist collectives reimagine the matador as a woman, not to celebrate the kill but to question who holds the sword. The bullring becomes a diagram of power, and contemporary artists are redrawing its lines.
The Persistence of the Traje de Luces
And then there’s the suit. The traje de luces—the suit of lights—is a masterpiece of contradiction: impossibly tight, heavily embroidered, designed to make a man look like a god while he does the devil’s work. Fashion designers and performance artists have been unable to resist it. Palomo Spain, the Córdoba-born designer whose gender-fluid creations have scandalized and seduced the fashion world, regularly returns to the silhouette of the matador. His collections don’t just reference the suit; they dissect it, pulling out the embroidery and draping it over bare skin, replacing the rigid trousers with cascades of silk. The traje de luces becomes a second skin that can be worn by anyone, a symbol of power detached from its original, toxic masculinity.
In performance art, the suit is a loaded weapon. The Madrid-based artist Pilar Albarracín has used it in her work to explosive effect. In one piece, she dresses as a matador and performs a “dance” that ends with her collapsing, the suit becoming a trap, a cage of gold thread. The bull is absent. The real opponent is the costume itself, the weight of tradition, the expectations stitched into every seam. Albarracín’s work asks: can you wear the suit without becoming the violence it represents? The answer, her trembling body suggests, is no.
The Bull as Self-Portrait
Perhaps the most unsettling persistence of the bullfight in contemporary art is the way artists use the bull as a stand-in for themselves. Not the matador—the bull. The animal that is taunted, bled, and ultimately killed for the entertainment of the crowd. In a culture that has turned artists into celebrities and then into content providers, the identification makes a twisted kind of sense. The artist enters the ring of the market, performs for a fickle audience, and hopes to survive the encounter with their dignity intact. The banderillas are bad reviews. The estoque is obscurity.
Look at the paintings of Abraham Lacalle. His bulls are not noble beasts. They’re cartoonish, pathetic, often dismembered, floating in fields of acidic color. They’re funny until they’re not. Lacalle’s work is a satire of Spanish machismo, but it’s also a self-portrait of the artist as a wounded animal, still expected to perform. The bull becomes a clown, a martyr, a fool. And the crowd—that’s us, scrolling through Instagram, double-tapping on images of suffering we’ll never truly understand.
The Ring as Memory Theater
What’s most striking about the persistence of bullfighting imagery in Spanish contemporary art is how it functions as a form of cultural memory, even for artists who have never set foot in a plaza de toros. The ring is a theater of collective trauma, a place where Spain has rehearsed its relationship with death, cruelty, and spectacle for centuries. To reject the bullfight outright is, in some sense, to reject a part of the Spanish psyche. But to engage with it—to twist it, to bleed it, to let it charge at the canvas—is to perform an exorcism.
Marta María Pérez Bravo, a Cuban-born artist who has spent much of her career in Spain, uses her own body to stage ritualistic photographs that echo the corrida without ever showing a bull. She wraps herself in white fabric that becomes a shroud, a cape, a bandage. She holds poses that suggest both ecstasy and agony. The bull is implied, always just outside the frame. It’s the viewer. It’s history. It’s the thing you can’t look at directly without being gored.
The Unkillable Image
So why does this imagery persist? Because it’s unkillable. You can ban bullfighting in Catalonia (as they did in 2010, only for the Constitutional Court to overturn the ban in 2016). You can watch attendance figures plummet. You can protest outside Las Ventas with fake blood on your hands. But the bull and the matador are lodged in the Spanish visual cortex like a splinter. They’re in the language—echar un capote (to lend a hand, literally “to throw a cape”), ver los toros desde la barrera (to watch from a safe distance, literally “to watch the bulls from the barrier”). They’re in the gestures, the colors, the way light falls on a plaza.
Contemporary Spanish artists aren’t reviving bullfighting. They’re performing an autopsy on it. They’re cutting open the corpse to see what’s inside, and what they’re finding is themselves. The bull is a mirror. The matador is a ghost. The ring is a wound that won’t close. And art, as always, is the only thing that can hold all of this without flinching.
FAQ
Why do contemporary Spanish artists still use bullfighting imagery if the practice is in decline?
Because the imagery has detached from the event itself and become a symbolic language. Artists use the bull, the matador, the cape, and the ring to talk about power, gender, violence, and national identity. The decline of the actual bullfight has, paradoxically, freed the imagery to be used more critically and creatively. It’s no longer about celebrating the spectacle; it’s about dissecting what the spectacle did to the Spanish soul.
Is all contemporary art that references bullfighting critical of the tradition?
Not necessarily, but the most interesting work is. There are still artists who approach the bullfight with reverence, but their work often feels like a stale echo of 19th-century costumbrismo. The art that resonates now is the art that treats the bullring as a site of trauma, a place where violence was aestheticized and sold as entertainment. Even when the references are oblique, the best contemporary Spanish art uses the iconography of the bullfight to ask uncomfortable questions about what we’re still willing to watch, and what we’re still willing to pay for.
How do artists avoid glorifying the violence of bullfighting while still using its imagery?
By inverting it, fragmenting it, or turning it against itself. Carmen Calvo doesn’t show the sword entering the bull; she shows the scar it leaves on the culture. Santiago Sierra doesn’t dress his performers in trajes de luces; he puts them in the position of the bull, the victim, and forces us to confront our own complicity as spectators. The most powerful contemporary work doesn’t depict the bullfight—it evokes its structure, its power dynamics, its aftermath. It makes the viewer feel like they’re in the ring, and then it asks: whose side are you on?
Is there a difference between how male and female artists approach bullfighting imagery?
Often, yes. Male artists have historically identified with the matador—the lone hero facing death with grace. But many contemporary female artists reject that identification entirely. They’re more likely to identify with the bull, the horse, or the earth itself—the bodies that are penetrated, the ground that soaks up the blood. Artists like Pilar Albarracín and Carmen Calvo use the imagery to expose the misogyny at the heart of the spectacle, where the bull is feminized, made into a thing to be dominated and displayed. Their work doesn’t just critique bullfighting; it critiques the entire macho mythology that the bullring enshrines.