Courage, imagination, change, justice: our best wishes for the New Year 2026. The HGB is taking a winter break and will be closed from 24 December 2025 to 4 January 2026.
The motif of the New Year's card, the painting Desmontaje by Ivana de Vivanco, Professor of Painting and Printmaking, is part of a series of works in which she explores the violent iconography of the so-called Santiago Matamoros and Santiago Mataindios - a pictorial tradition that is still effective today in Spain and the former Spanish colonies. In her artistic work, de Vivanco deconstructs these colonial narratives and develops new pictorial forms. The focus is increasingly on the horse - or more precisely, the mare - which frees itself from the role of the bearer of violence and becomes an independent, resistant figure. The enduring topicality of this iconography is demonstrated by the fact that Santiago still has to be "pushed off his horse".
The printing concept for the card was developed by designer and professor of typography Marion Kliesch. The card appears in several colour variants: While only one version follows the correct CMYK allocation, the cyan, magenta and yellow printing plates on the other cards were deliberately rotated and inserted into the "wrong" colour units. The resulting colour shifts make the motif appear in a different mood in each case and refer to breakage, experimentation and the questioning of conventions - in offset printing as well as in dealing with iconographic traditions. The respective shift can be read on the reverse via a small CMY marking.
The motif and print experiment combine our wishes for the new year: the courage to take a stand and not allow ourselves to be taken in. Imagination to open up spaces beyond the given. Change to actively shape the future. And justice as a central political and social concern in a time of multiple crises.