Imprenta y Tauromaquia opened at Antequera Town Hall in southern Spain on Tuesday, 11 August 2026, bringing together more than 40 historical bullfighting posters from the city’s municipal archive.
Running until 20 August in the Sala de Exposiciones Antonio Montiel, the exhibition treats the posters as more than advertisements for past spectacles. Produced between the late nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth, they chart changes in printing, graphic design and public communication while preserving details of the society that commissioned and read them.
From street notice to historical record
The posters were designed to convey practical information quickly. They named bullfighters and breeders, listed dates, prices and seating, and communicated the rules surrounding individual events. Decades later, those same details allow researchers and visitors to reconstruct local customs, commercial networks and the visual language of popular entertainment.
According to Cadena SER’s report on the inauguration, lithography and later photomechanical processes are central to the display. Their coexistence shows how printers adapted images, lettering and densely packed information as production technology changed. The posters therefore sit at the intersection of craft, design and mass media, rather than belonging only to the history of bullfighting.
A collection shaped by local printers and donors
Local newspaper El Sol de Antequera identifies several donors whose material entered the municipal collection, including Juan Espinosa and José Moreno Martínez. It also records the names of printing houses represented in the show, among them Salvador Acuña, Gionella, Ortega, Francisco Muñoz, Hijos de Salvador Acuña, Velasco and El Progreso.
Those names give Imprenta y Tauromaquia a distinctly local dimension. The exhibition does not present an anonymous survey assembled from the art market. It draws on documents kept by the Archivo Histórico Municipal de Antequera, where conservation work has preserved fragile paper objects whose everyday purpose might otherwise have made them disposable.
Design history inside a contested tradition
Bullfighting remains culturally and ethically contested in contemporary Spain. Looking at its printed material as design history does not resolve that debate, but it can widen the evidence through which the tradition is understood. Posters reveal how spectacle was marketed, how civic identity was constructed and how visual conventions helped turn temporary events into collective memory.
The timing links the display to Antequera’s Real Feria de Agosto, yet its value extends beyond the fair. By placing archival ephemera in a municipal gallery, the organisers invite visitors to examine the mechanics of persuasion as well as the events advertised. The show demonstrates how typography, illustration and printing technology can outlast their original function and become records of changing taste.
The exhibition is open from 11am to 2pm on weekdays until Thursday, 20 August. Admission is free.
Featured image: Antequera Town Hall, which houses the Sala de Exposiciones Antonio Montiel. This contextual photograph does not show the exhibition, its posters or the inauguration. Photo by Zarateman, 2020, CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons. No editorial modification other than automatic WordPress resizing.
