Miquel Barceló Spanish, 1957
Untitled, 2020
Mixed media on canvas
114.5 x 146 cm. (45 1/8 x 57 1/2 in.)
Copyright The Artist
Further images
For Miquel Barceló, the bullfight has long acted as both subject and metaphor, a way to probe the physical, cultural and psychological forces that have shaped the Spanish tradition. The...
For Miquel Barceló, the bullfight has long acted as both subject and metaphor, a way to probe the physical, cultural and psychological forces that have shaped the Spanish tradition. The artist has long spoken about the act of painting as a kind of physical contest, likening his movements in the studio to the turns of a torero in the ring. “One doesn’t paint with ideas,” he remarked in 1998. “The painting happens outside ideas, in contradiction to ideas even, generating ideas.” He described stepping into the centre of the canvas as if entering the sanded circle of the plaza, leaving behind a record of gestures, marks and sweeps that build into an “overfull” pictorial field. In his art, the arena occupies everything; the crowd, when present at all, is pushed to the margins.
The drama, ceremony and violence of the corrida have captivated artists for centuries. Spanish painters and writers have repeatedly returned to it for its symbolism and its ritual structure, which carry meanings well beyond sport. For many, the bullfight becomes a stage on which ideas about life, death, courage and spectacle play out in condensed, emblematic form.
Barceló was born in Felanitx, Mallorca, in 1957. He studied at Palma de Mallorca’s Fine Arts School and later at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona. In the mid-1970s he took part in the happenings of Taller Llunàtic, an experimental group active in performance and protest, before gaining early visibility at the São Paulo Biennial in 1981 and documenta 7 in 1982. His work of this period engaged closely with Art Informel and the European post-war tradition of gestural, spontaneous abstraction. These influences gave him a way to address what he later called the “burden” of Western art history – a legacy he respected but also needed to push against.
A decisive shift came after his first trip to West Africa in 1988. From the early 1990s he kept a home in the Dogon region of Mali, and the experience of working at a distance from Europe proved transformative. Rather than adopting African motifs for their exotic appeal, he focused on the material realities of daily life, the light, and above all the earth itself. Clay, dust, ash and animal matter entered the work, grounding it in a tactile physicality that remains central to his practice.
The bullfight, meanwhile, has stayed one of Spain’s most contested and recognisable cultural forms. For its supporters it is a structured drama of skill and presence; for its critics it is an outdated and violent ritual. Its importance within Spanish art has been undeniable. Goya, an enthusiastic aficionado, understood bullfighting as a symbolic struggle between life and death. Picasso’s lifelong engagement with the subject began in childhood and carried through his mature work, where the bull emerged as a figure of rage, suffering and mythological force.
Human fascination with the bull long predates modern art. Archaeological sites from Anatolia to Mesopotamia show bull images and cults that linked the animal to strength, fertility and protection. The bull has served as guardian, god and sacrifice; a creature both revered and feared. Barceló’s engagement with the theme belongs to this deep lineage as much as to the Spanish tradition.
His involvement with the corrida as an artistic subject began formally with commissions for bullfight posters, first for Nîmes in 1988 and later for Madrid in 1990. That same summer, newly returned to Mallorca after extensive travel, he painted a major series of around thirty works devoted to the bullfight. These canvases capture the event in successive phases, from the opening movements to the final passes of the muleta. Works such as Faena de muleta, La cuadrilla and La suerte de varas demonstrate how he translated the unfolding action into a vocabulary of sweeping marks, layered surfaces and luminous colour. In 2011 Barceló was commissioned to design a poster for the last corrida held in Barcelona before the Catalan ban came into force. By doing so he placed himself in a long line of artists who have treated the theme – among them Dalí, Masson, Bacon and above all Goya, whose Tauromaquia remains a touchstone for any contemporary depiction of the bullfight.
What distinguishes Barceló’s interpretation is his sense of distance and solitude. The torero is often seen from afar, dwarfed by the circular sweep of the ring. The fight is not dramatised through narrative detail but through the physical presence of the paint itself. The process unfolds, like the corrida, in stages. First, the canvas is prepared, its surface built up with natural materials that create a terrain. Barceló then attacks and reworks the surface, pushing pigment and earth across it, wrestling with form as the torero wrestles with the bull. The exterior curve of the ring often swells with a thick, almost ceramic weight, while the interior is pressed into a dense, flat disc. These tensions echo the movements of the fight – the back-and-forth, the shifting of weight, the constant recalibration of position.
The final stage is more measured but no less significant. The brushwork settles into place, echoing the footwork of the torero as he prepares for the kill. The painting is brought to rest, its internal energy released but still legible in the layers of material left behind. The result is a form of “total composition” that collapses image, gesture and ritual into a single field. In these paintings Barceló draws together his diverse influences – European abstraction, the material culture of Mali, and the long Spanish tradition of bullfighting imagery – to create works that feel both contemporary and deeply rooted.
The corrida remains divisive within Spain, and its prohibition in Catalonia has only sharpened debates about heritage and identity. Barceló’s work acknowledges this tension without resolving it. His bullfight paintings do not celebrate the spectacle outright, nor do they condemn it. Instead, they record its energy, its rhythms and its symbolic weight. Untitled from 2020 continues this line of inquiry: the arena as stage, the solitary figure as protagonist, and the act of painting as an analogue for the contest itself. Through abstraction, material density and a sensitive handling of light and form, Barceló offers not a depiction of the bullfight but a meditation on the forces – physical, cultural and psychological – that shape it.
The drama, ceremony and violence of the corrida have captivated artists for centuries. Spanish painters and writers have repeatedly returned to it for its symbolism and its ritual structure, which carry meanings well beyond sport. For many, the bullfight becomes a stage on which ideas about life, death, courage and spectacle play out in condensed, emblematic form.
Barceló was born in Felanitx, Mallorca, in 1957. He studied at Palma de Mallorca’s Fine Arts School and later at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Barcelona. In the mid-1970s he took part in the happenings of Taller Llunàtic, an experimental group active in performance and protest, before gaining early visibility at the São Paulo Biennial in 1981 and documenta 7 in 1982. His work of this period engaged closely with Art Informel and the European post-war tradition of gestural, spontaneous abstraction. These influences gave him a way to address what he later called the “burden” of Western art history – a legacy he respected but also needed to push against.
A decisive shift came after his first trip to West Africa in 1988. From the early 1990s he kept a home in the Dogon region of Mali, and the experience of working at a distance from Europe proved transformative. Rather than adopting African motifs for their exotic appeal, he focused on the material realities of daily life, the light, and above all the earth itself. Clay, dust, ash and animal matter entered the work, grounding it in a tactile physicality that remains central to his practice.
The bullfight, meanwhile, has stayed one of Spain’s most contested and recognisable cultural forms. For its supporters it is a structured drama of skill and presence; for its critics it is an outdated and violent ritual. Its importance within Spanish art has been undeniable. Goya, an enthusiastic aficionado, understood bullfighting as a symbolic struggle between life and death. Picasso’s lifelong engagement with the subject began in childhood and carried through his mature work, where the bull emerged as a figure of rage, suffering and mythological force.
Human fascination with the bull long predates modern art. Archaeological sites from Anatolia to Mesopotamia show bull images and cults that linked the animal to strength, fertility and protection. The bull has served as guardian, god and sacrifice; a creature both revered and feared. Barceló’s engagement with the theme belongs to this deep lineage as much as to the Spanish tradition.
His involvement with the corrida as an artistic subject began formally with commissions for bullfight posters, first for Nîmes in 1988 and later for Madrid in 1990. That same summer, newly returned to Mallorca after extensive travel, he painted a major series of around thirty works devoted to the bullfight. These canvases capture the event in successive phases, from the opening movements to the final passes of the muleta. Works such as Faena de muleta, La cuadrilla and La suerte de varas demonstrate how he translated the unfolding action into a vocabulary of sweeping marks, layered surfaces and luminous colour. In 2011 Barceló was commissioned to design a poster for the last corrida held in Barcelona before the Catalan ban came into force. By doing so he placed himself in a long line of artists who have treated the theme – among them Dalí, Masson, Bacon and above all Goya, whose Tauromaquia remains a touchstone for any contemporary depiction of the bullfight.
What distinguishes Barceló’s interpretation is his sense of distance and solitude. The torero is often seen from afar, dwarfed by the circular sweep of the ring. The fight is not dramatised through narrative detail but through the physical presence of the paint itself. The process unfolds, like the corrida, in stages. First, the canvas is prepared, its surface built up with natural materials that create a terrain. Barceló then attacks and reworks the surface, pushing pigment and earth across it, wrestling with form as the torero wrestles with the bull. The exterior curve of the ring often swells with a thick, almost ceramic weight, while the interior is pressed into a dense, flat disc. These tensions echo the movements of the fight – the back-and-forth, the shifting of weight, the constant recalibration of position.
The final stage is more measured but no less significant. The brushwork settles into place, echoing the footwork of the torero as he prepares for the kill. The painting is brought to rest, its internal energy released but still legible in the layers of material left behind. The result is a form of “total composition” that collapses image, gesture and ritual into a single field. In these paintings Barceló draws together his diverse influences – European abstraction, the material culture of Mali, and the long Spanish tradition of bullfighting imagery – to create works that feel both contemporary and deeply rooted.
The corrida remains divisive within Spain, and its prohibition in Catalonia has only sharpened debates about heritage and identity. Barceló’s work acknowledges this tension without resolving it. His bullfight paintings do not celebrate the spectacle outright, nor do they condemn it. Instead, they record its energy, its rhythms and its symbolic weight. Untitled from 2020 continues this line of inquiry: the arena as stage, the solitary figure as protagonist, and the act of painting as an analogue for the contest itself. Through abstraction, material density and a sensitive handling of light and form, Barceló offers not a depiction of the bullfight but a meditation on the forces – physical, cultural and psychological – that shape it.