The work of Miguel Ángel Blanco centres on nature. He began his most important project, The Library of the Forest, in 1986. It consists of box-books containing botanical, mineral, animal and insect items taken from nature, sealed behind glass, with some introductory pages containing drawings, engravings and photographic prints. Blanco sees these box-books as microcosms, new landscapes that express nature in all its phenomenology and in all its geographical and symbolic breadth. Blanco lived for many years in the Sierra de Guadarrama, his favourite artistic stomping ground. In 2006, La Casa Encendida in Madrid staged an exhibition of his work entitled 'Visions of Guadarrama. Miguel Ángel Blanco and the pioneering artists of the Sierra'. The show featured his box-books alongside paintings by some of the outstanding nineteenth-century Spanish landscape artists who had found their inspiration in these same mountains. Several selections from his Library of the Forest have been exhibited at the National Library of Madrid, the National Print Museum of Mexico City, the César Manrique Foundation in Lanzarote, the National Museum of Engraving in Madrid and the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos (Reina Sofía Museum), among other venues.

In 2008, Blanco was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture to create a tribute to the dead beech tree in the garden of the Lázaro Galdiano Foundation in Madrid, where he also staged an exhibition entitled 'Fallen Tree', focusing on the relationship between tree and time. In 2013 the Prado Museum presented his Natural Histories project, which references the original purpose of Juan de Villanueva's building as a natural science museum. In the exhibition, Blanco drew links between some of the most important paintings housed in the Prado, historical specimens from all the natural kingdoms and his own work, to create a remarkable contemporary Wunderkammer. In 2015 he curated 'The Illusion of the American Frontier' at the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid. In 1995 he was awarded the National Engraving Award and in 2004 the Villa de Madrid 'Lucio Muñoz' Engraving Award.

Beatriz Espejo