Mikel Urmeneta is the author this year of the bullfighting poster – the Feria del Toro de Sanfermin 2013, which was presented to the public today by the Casa de Misericordia organization in Pamplona. This entity is responsible for organizing the bullfight week during Sanfermin fiestas. Present at the press conference was Mikel Urmeneta himself, along with members of the board of the Casa de Misericordia, among them the president of the bullfighting commission, José María Marco, as well as the mayor of Pamplona, Enrique Maya.
The poster made by Mikel Urmeneta endorses a long-term rapport in this artist with the world of art and with the world of bullfighting. Urmeneta presented a photo of an object he had come across, i.e. a part of a wooden foldable table in which the contour of a bull can be clearly made out whether looked at from above, behind or in front of the object and it seems to be just coming out of the pens to enter the bullring. On the use of this material, Mikel Urmeneta stated that “the combination of the Wood and Iron (with its singular form and color), evokes the entrance doors of the Pamplona bullring; the corrals and the bullpens”.
“The poster fulfills its mission of making a strong visual impact and at the same time stating the theme of what is being announced on the poster,” explains Urmeneta, who affirms that it is a poster which is “respectful of the Bullfight week”, but which also opens up “fresh approaches” than the more traditional ones often found in the world of the bullfighting poster”.
Urmeneta now joins a list of prestigious artists whose work has been commissioned down the years by the Casa de Misericordia organization which has been responsible for the posters for more than half a century. Among these, the designer, José María Cruz Novillo (1971), the Portuguese painter, Luis Pinto-Coelho (1979), painter and sculptor Eduardo Úrculo (1996), the Colombian artist, Fernando Botero (1998), photographer Jim Hollander (2002) or the architect, Rafael Moneo (2009)
This year the Casa de Misericordia personally commissioned a poster design from Mikel Urmeneta. The poster is wholly made by Urmeneta who is also the creative director of Kukuxumusu. The trademark of this company has always been its ability to make drawings which are chronicles and which, at the same time, portray a graphic humorous vision of the contemporary world. The company has never taken a strong stand on any of the polemical issues arising from the world of bullfighting but has simply limited itself to portraying the current reality of bullfighting. In fact, Kukuxumusu has managed to simultaneously do some work for the anti-bullfighting PETA organization while, at the very same time, continue to do its own comical drawings about the running of the bulls for its T-shirt collections, thus reaffirming its wish to reproduce all the existing points of view within our society.
