Contemporary Spanish Poster Project

The Contemporary Spanish Poster project brings together a selection of contemporary designers whose work repositions the poster within a culturally relevant context. What connects these positions is a shared attitude. The poster is not merely a carrier of information, but the expression of an independent and distinctive visual truth, often rooted in culture and always aware of context and the public sphere.

A project by Artediez and the Panama Poster Group, curated by Sonia Díaz, Gabriel Martínez, and Ivo Baldovinos Carleo, Contemporary Spanish Poster establishes a framework for this exploration as a platform that brings together diverse design positions and translates them into a shared discourse.

Óscar Mariné works with a vividly colored, illustrative visual language that moves between expressive directness and ironic inflection. Isidro Ferrer advances the idea of the poster as object, a condensed moment in public space, a form of visual theater. David Torrents develops a hybrid typography, a layered field of textures that searches for new graphic vocabularies. Ibán Ramón reduces, organizes, and refines, creating geometric compositions that unfold a quiet spatial complexity. Javier Jaén constructs images that are at once obvious and enigmatic, and precisely in that tension they evoke a sense of visual poetry. Quim Marin choreographs typography, image, and color into rhythmic compositions that are both functional and expressive. Koln Studio relies on radical reduction, using minimal forms with high conceptual density. Brave New World represents a collective practice, design as a shared process and as a political and social act.

Within an increasingly pragmatic understanding of design, the poster takes on a particular role. It remains one of the few media capable of resisting pure functionality, a space for attitude, friction, and critical thought. This raises a question. What kind of truth can design articulate today? What form can expression take?

Ibán Ramón offers one possible answer. Designing posters today can be a political and cultural act, a way of returning to the city some of its capacity to communicate something beyond commercial messages.

The publication Poster Thinking documents and reflects on the curatorial work of more than 14 exhibitions within madridgráfica and supergráfico from 2008 to 2025, as well as the Contemporary Spanish Poster project, published by FANSBOOK (Artediez).