This Monday, the Real Maestranza de Caballería unveiled the poster announcing the 2026 bullfighting season in Seville, a work by the Czech painter Georg Dokoupil that features Morante de la Puebla. At the event, held in the Hall of Posters in the bullring, Morante joked about his status as a model, congratulated the poster artist and wished luck to the new businessman of La Maestranza, José María Garzón. “We are all going to enjoy this fair; it is going to be my comeback and I feel very responsible with all the expectations that there are on me,” said the matador.
The gallery owner Fernando Francés, commissioned by the Real Maestranza to carry out the commission, has indicated that he had intended to make “a tribute to bullfighting and to the figure of Morante, who had just announced his retirement.” Francés has revealed that the author did not give up his efforts – he painted several paintings – until he achieved one to his complete satisfaction. Dokoupil himself, an artist ascribed to Neo-Expressionism, has alluded to his source of inspiration. “There is no bullfighter who has a better figure,” he noted to applause.
Dokoupil’s work will serve to stamp all the ticketing, hand-held programs, triptychs and global posters for the festivities held in the Sevillian bullring during the 2026 season. The work, finally, will add to the extensive collection of contemporary art that has given its name to the bullring space in which they are exhibited throughout the year. Dokoupil’s work will join the increasingly extensive list of prestigious firms that have accepted the offer of the Real Maestranza to announce the Sevillian bullfighting season since 1994 at the initiative of the remembered painter and master knight Juan Maestre, the determined promoter of this initiative that has given the nobility one of the best-known art collections in the city.
The collection of posters, which has given its name to the hall that houses them in the bullring, contains signatures such as those of Luis Manuel Fernández, Miquel Barceló, Carmen Laffón, Botero, Salinas, Luis Gordillo, Hernán Cortés, Norman Foster, the Mexican creator Abraham Cruz Villegas or the Austrian Martha Jungwirth, who signed last year’s poster. The event also served to announce the journalist Rubén Amón as bullfighting preacher for next Easter Sunday.