Stefania Tejada (b. 1990) is a Colombian artist based in Paris whose practice positions figurative oil painting as a critical site for examining cultural memory and the forces that shape moral and psychological formation. Her work explores how belief systems and social narratives inform identity and interior life, using symbolism and the natural world as generative spaces through which new meanings emerge.
Drawing on religious and mythological stories, she reworks their imagery to construct alternative narratives that challenge traditional roles, hierarchies, and moral assumptions passed down through time. Questions of lineage, displacement, and collective memory quietly structure her practice. With a background in fashion design, advertising, and communication, Tejada brings an acute awareness of narrative construction and visual persuasion to painting.
How has your personal history shaped your artistic practice?
It shaped my practice through an awareness of how power settles into the body and the mind long before it becomes language. I grew up in environments where religion, social hierarchy, and inherited roles shaped everyday life in quiet but persistent ways. There was an understanding that not everyone moved through the world with the same weight or freedom, even if I didn’t yet know how to name why. That early sensitivity made me attentive to the narratives we inherit, especially those that shape femininity, virtue, and authority. I often think about my mother and grandmothers, considering how social, cultural, and religious expectations shaped their futures, choices, and sense of self. There is a deep contradiction in these stories, with strength and submission existing side by side and devotion entangled with control. There is also quite a lot of damage, the kind that doesn’t announce itself but leaves lasting psychological traces. Painting allows me to stay with those contradictions, not to resolve them, but to acknowledge how they continue to be carried and negotiated by women every day.
After leaving Colombia, I began to understand these experiences more clearly, through distance, reflection, and most definitely, learning. What had once felt like atmosphere became legible as structure. Painting became the space where I could return to these lived realities without accusation or nostalgia and where I could think about power not as something singular but as something relational and embodied. My work is guided by a desire to hold complexity, to move between perspectives, and to tell stories that recognise different expressions of humanity while insisting on a shared ground. In that sense, painting has become both a personal inquiry and a collective one, a way of seeing how we are shaped and how we might imagine ourselves otherwise.
What does femininity mean to you?
Femininity has never been a simple or comfortable word for me. I was not raised to embody it as a performance, which is how it appeared to me as I observed other women during my formative years. Early on, I understood how closely the idea of femininity was tied to the male gaze, to systems of visibility and approval that ask women to soften, contain, or diminish themselves. To embody it meant living under someone else’s vision of what a woman should be. What reshaped that understanding were the women closest to me, particularly those on my mother’s side, and others who lived outside prescribed structures. Many were unmarried, independent, and unwilling to negotiate their inner lives for social comfort. It was not about appearance but about force, a force shaped by endurance, contradiction, and will. I began to understand femininity as a form of inner sovereignty.
For me, femininity is not something to be claimed, but something that emerges when fear is confronted rather than avoided. Artistically, this understanding shapes how I approach the figure. The women in my work are not ideals or symbols; they are presences. They exist in states of tension and self-possession. Femininity, in my work, is a willingness to step into that unknown, to face the void without reassurance.
You’re currently based in Paris. How does this cultural contrast influence your work?
Living in Paris has changed the way I listen to myself. My relationship with Latin America was shaped by closeness, by emotion, by a kind of immediacy where life and feeling were never separate. Things were lived before they were considered. Here, that order shifts. Thought arrives earlier. Reflection intervenes. I find myself asking not only what I feel, but why I feel it, and how that feeling takes shape. Each place feeds the work differently.
Colombia gave me an emotional literacy and an instinct for intensity, contradiction, and intimacy. Art there felt closer to visual language, to the body, and to daily life. It was less concerned with positioning itself within a lineage and more with responding to experience. Paris, on the other hand, carries the weight of art history. Painting here is in constant conversation with what came before it. I am interested in what happens when instinct is held long enough to become thought and when thought is allowed to remain vulnerable to feeling. Painting becomes the space where these ways of being meet. Where the intensity I carry from my origins is slowed by reflection, and where reflection is warmed by lived experience. The work grows out of this friction. From a sustained attention to contradiction, to complexity, and to the way life resists being simplified into a single narrative.
What role does your Colombian heritage play?
Emotion appears in the work before thought, emerging through colour, the body, and an instinctive closeness to nature. Also, nature has always been inseparable from my life and, by extension, from my work, yet never as a mere backdrop – I see it more as a state of mind. The environments of my childhood were active presences, sometimes protective, sometimes threatening. In my paintings, these spaces become psychological territories shaped by memory and instinct, reflecting an inner passage rather than a specific place. I often think of that passage as stepping alone into the jungle, a moment when what once held me together could no longer stay intact. The earth, the mud, and the density of that world became agents of change, stripping things away and forcing transformation. Change didn’t feel like a choice so much as a necessity. That experience connects closely to the figure of the Wild Woman, not as a myth, but as a form of embodied knowledge rooted in instinct, endurance, and survival. The landscapes in my work hold that rupture and what comes after it; they carry loss and renewal as part of the same movement.
Is there a recurring symbol that continues to accompany you in your work?
Over the past few years, certain symbols have settled into my visual vocabulary. The macaw, the nautilus shell, and, at times, wild flowers continue to return to the work. What draws these forms together for me is their relationship to power, liberation, and transformation. The macaw embodies a kind of unapologetic force, something vocal, alert, and untamed. The nautilus shell speaks in a different register. Its spiral suggests a sort of continuity and interior life and a sense of time that unfolds slowly and patiently. It carries the logic of cycles, of life moving through death and renewal, but without rupture. Wildflowers introduce another tension. They connect me to the experience of women in Colombia, to a form of resistance that is quiet and absolute. They grow where they are not meant to, refuse control, and would rather disappear than submit. In that sense, they speak to sacrifice but also to dignity. Together, these symbols open a space for me where I can experience existence as cyclical, shaped through repetition, loss, and return. They hold opposing states at once: strength and vulnerability, presence and disappearance. I am not interested in fixing their meaning.
What does a typical day in your studio look like?
During spring, summer, and fall, I usually work in the studio until 7 or 8 in the evening. In winter, the days are shorter, and so are my working hours. Natural light is essential to me, especially when working with oil paint. I come to the studio and start painting immediately. Any thinking, sketching, or drawing happens at home, where I can reflect, question, and sit with uncertainty. The studio, in contrast, is a space of action for me.
When I’m experimenting, music becomes important. Certain songs allow me to let go of hesitation and enter a more emotional, almost spiritual state. I experience painting as a form of channelling, with energies, images, and visions arriving from within and beyond.
Some days move quickly; others unfold slowly. Before leaving, I always take time to observe what I’ve done and what I’ll return to the next day. I circle the work, step away, and come back, repeating this small ritual until the lights go off. That moment of departure is as important as the act of painting itself. It leaves me with a quiet sense of awe for the work, for my practice, for my own life, and for the experience of creating itself.
How do your colour worlds come to life? Intuitive or planned?
Colour comes almost as a feeling, demanding trust and never directed. There are certain shades of green I often use, especially Phthalo Emerald and Vert Clair Permanent. They feel like a familiar place. I could describe my relationship with colour as a form of collaboration, almost a dialogue. There is a moment of immediacy when I reach for a tube. I feel it instantly—a sense of approval or rejection that happens before thought. It’s physical, intuitive, and difficult to explain, yet very clear. Colour responds, and I respond in return. In that exchange, colour begins to express what the work is ready to hold.
What role does intuition play?
Intuition is the core of my process and of my life. It’s the place where decisions are made before they are articulated and where my body responds before the mind intervenes. I rely on it as a form of knowledge, one that comes from experience, memory, and attention. Intuition is what has gotten me this far, in painting and life. In the studio, it guides everything from colour and composition to knowing when to stop, when to wait, and when to push further. It’s not impulsive. It requires listening closely to what the work is asking for in a given moment. When I ignore that voice, the painting resists. When I follow it, the work opens. Over time, I’ve learnt that intuition isn’t opposed to rigour. It’s sharpened by it. Working this way means staying present and willing to move without certainty, but still with confidence, because I know that trusting it brings something essential. It allows the painting to unfold in its own time.
What does freedom mean to you, in life, not just in art?
It is not the absence of limits but the refusal to live in contradiction with myself. It is the ability to act, feel, and choose without constantly negotiating with fear, expectation, or inherited roles. I’ve learned that freedom is rarely comfortable and rarely innocent. It often requires rupture, loss, and the courage to walk away from structures that once offered protection but quietly asked for self-erasure in return. In life, as in painting, freedom is a form of responsibility.
To me, freedom lives in staying emotionally available, in allowing instinct, memory, and contradiction to coexist without needing to be resolved or justified. It is a daily practice of attention, honesty, and the discipline of remaining close to oneself, even when it would be easier not to.
What’s next?
I’ve recently moved through a period of change that was necessary to align my practice. I’ve just finished Magdalena, which marks this shift, now part of FAMM: Femmes Artistes du Musée de Mougins through Christian Levett’s collection. This represents my second institutional placement. I’m interested in deepening the language I’ve been building and allowing the work to expand into new territories. What matters most is context: sustained dialogue, shared vision, and the possibility of growing the work within a framework that knows its origins and its direction. What follows is a continuation of a direction I am consciously shaping, with a sense of responsibility to both the work and the relationships that support it.
Stefania Tejada – www.stefaniatejada.com, www.instagram.com/stefaniatejada, www.instagram.com/stefaniatejadastudio
Stefania Tejada (b. 1990, Tuluá, Colombia) is a Franco-Colombian artist based in Paris. Her practice operates at the intersection of symbolic figuration, critical inquiry, and visual culture, examining how belief systems, cultural memory, and structures of power shape identity. She studied Fashion Design in Bogotá and Monterrey, where illustration and image-making became foundational to her visual language. After relocating to Paris in 2019, she expanded into oil painting, developing a materially driven practice alongside her digital work. She moves deliberately between mediums, treating each as a distinct register of time, circulation, and value. In 2022, she presented her first solo exhibition in Paris, The Almighty Feminine, marking a pivotal moment in her exploration of feminine archetypes and spiritual narratives. Her work is held in major private and institutional collections, including the Laurence Graff Collection (acquired through Christie’s, 2023), the Tunji Akintokun African Art Collection, the De Iorio Collection (Italy), the Christian Levett / FAMM Museum collection (France), and the collection of Princess Elisabeth von Thurn und Taxis (USA/Germany). In 2023, she made her secondary-market debut at Christie’s in First Open: Post-War & Contemporary Art, curated by Aindrea Emelife, in support of the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA).
