Chuma Montemayor

Chuma Montemayor has made a career out of stripping things down; ideas, identities, his own life, until what’s left is raw, strange, and somehow still beautiful. Born in Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas, and now based in Monterrey, he began in journalism, shooting for Periódico El Norte, before realizing his real job was digging deeper than a headline ever could.

His work blends personal history with poetic dissection. Think memory, trauma, and emotional scar tissue turned into photographic evidence. His series Callo de Fractura (Fracture Callus) explores the bruises you can’t see but somehow still feel, launching a new body of work that blurs clarity, time, and what we think we remember.

He calls his art “an exercise in emotional honesty,” but Lola calls it a kind of visual therapy session… minus the couch, plus the ghosts. He once wrote, “I don’t even like doing art,” which, frankly, is the most relatable thing an artist has ever said in a statement.

Exhibited across the Americas, collected in all the cities with good coffee and childhood baggage, Chuma’s work asks you to sit with your shadows, and maybe even sing to them.