Translations:Hernando Tejada/4/en

Although he spent his early years in Pereira and Manizales, Tejada lived in Cali from infancy and primarily worked and presented his art in the city, with the La Tertulia museum being a vital space for meeting his public. He studied at the Fine Arts Institute in Cali and completed his training at the School of Fine Arts in Bogotá. In the vein of the artists who traveled to tribal, primitive worlds in the first half of the 20th century in order to undergo an internal journey and renew the artistic traditions, Tejada spent a period on the islands of San Andrés and Providencia, and later along the Magdalena river and the Pacific coast, in the company of the artist Alipio Jaramillo. These journeys are mainly evinced in the first phase of his career and the mangrove series that he produced towards the end of his life.

Hernando Tejada had great prominence over the course of his career. In the 1940s he found a place in the modernist current that principally converged in Bogotá, and he formed part of the Generación de los 26, so-called for the number of artists who participated in the Contemporary Painting Exhibition at the National Museum in 1948. In the 1950s he was commissioned to create various murals in public spaces in Cali, Palmira and Bogotá with themes alluding to transport and the history of Cali and Colombia, along with others with more thematic freedom such as the one he produced for the Fine Arts faculty of the National University in the capital Bogotá. He took part in several editions of the National Colombian Artists Show, and in biennials such as those held by Coltejer in Medellín and others in Sao Paulo and Venice.