Blanca Tejerina presents Dancing With at Mecha as her first solo show, a series of works that transport us into the world of boxing and their behind-the-scenes.
From a painterly perspective, she develops a working method rooted in life drawing, fight recordings, and movement studies. Through these, she seeks to capture the slowed-down time of a match and its in-between moments. Oil, acrylic, and ink portraits compose figures in pure color patches, with the brushstroke fixing the intention of the painting by tracing the direction of the punches.
All of these works stem from the artist’s initiation into boxing in 2019. Two years later, she began producing artworks based on training sessions and matches at the Aluche municipal gym in Madrid. From these encounters, she has chosen to portray named boxers as both contemporary heroic figures and fragile martyrs.
For Tejerina, the boxing ring conceals themes far beyond victory and violence; boxing is also a sport of care and tenderness, of recovery and self-awareness. Beyond the sport’s technical aspects, through portraiture, she discovers in boxers men and women who surrender themselves to the mental and physical sacrifice of being fighters, with a spirituality that matches their effort and nearness to death.
Blanca Tejerina (Santander, 1997) is a visual artist with a degree in Fine Arts from the Rey Juan Carlos University in Madrid (2021). Blanca develops an artistic practice grounded in research through lived experience and critical reflection, intertwining personal experiences with themes such as the domestication of nature, the tension between the wild and the structured, and the relationship between human and non-human beings. With a visual language that alternates between gestural drawing and the use of acrylic color fields, Blanca transforms everyday life experiences —walking, contemplation, boxing, or affection for animals— into compositions that oscillate between the symbolic and the intuitive, where line becomes structure and color an emotio- nal territory, shaping a poetic reading of the natural and the lived.
She is currently an artist-in-residence at La Tabacalera (Santander) and works at the Meyremo studio, where she is preparing her upcoming solo exhibition at the Centro Cultural Doctor Madrazo. Mecha was the first to curate a solo show of her work, titled Dancing With (2024). She has participated in group exhibitions such as The Dyas & Friends at The Koppel Project in London (Wow, what, 2024), in institutions like the Museo de Zaragoza (Goya y Feminismo, 2022), and in independent venues such as Sala Siroco (Neoguturx, 2022). Her work has also been featured in fairs and festivals such as ARTESANTANDER (2024) with Mecha, the MAV Biennial (Madrid, 2020), and the MMMAD digital art festival (Madrid, 2024).
Her work has been published in Papeleo_Cuadernos Drawing Room (2024), a magazine specializing in contemporary international drawing.