Cabezabomba Art, culture, and the conversations that matter. Browse Latest Posts We think culture writing should be as fearless as the work it examines. Our critics and contributors tackle music, visual art, film, and performance with the attention and sharpness these art forms demand. We’re not here to play it safe… Topics we cover: Visual […]
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 […]
There’s a lie that haunts Spanish and Latin American art criticism. It smells like linseed oil and significant rhetoric. The lie: that political protest art is born spontaneous, that it erupts from the guts of the people, that it is the opposite of planning. I’ve heard this myth in gallery talks at the Reina Sofía, […]
You can’t walk into a major Spanish contemporary art museum without tripping over it. Not the bull itself—though it shows up often enough—but the whole architecture of the corrida. The rigid choreography, the ritualized bloodshed, the strutting masculinity, the sharp cut of light and shadow. It’s there in video installations, in performance pieces, in the […]
Let’s talk about the bull. Not the animal grazing in a field, but the bleeding, tortured icon that still struts and staggers through the white cubes of Spanish contemporary art. You’d think, in a country that passed its first national animal welfare law in 2023, the visual culture would have moved on. You’d be wrong. […]
Bullfighting isn’t a sport. It’s a choreographed sacrifice, a death cult dressed in gold embroidery that Spain has spent centuries selling as high culture. Even as public funding dries up and attendance dwindles, the imagery of the ring—the estoque, the muleta, the blood-soaked sand—clings stubbornly to the walls of our galleries and the streets of […]