October, 1989
México
Chantal Meza is a self-taught painter living and working in the United Kingdom.
Her works speak to the intimate and the most timeless of all shared human questions. The key theme in her work has concerned human disappearance. She has addressed aesthetic concerns with wounding, the psychology of loss, memory and forgetting, the spectral traces of history, and the complex topography of that absent space called the void.
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Chantal is also firmly committed to the public and educative value of art, with her works featuring in prominent university settings and other public spaces to inspire new conversations.
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Chantal's original work offers a marriage between the contemporary and the ancestral. Her home environment placed her amongst many local stone artisans whose unique regional skills date back to the pre-Hispanic period. Chantal has incorporated this knowledge into her paintings, including the direct use of hands as a medium of human sensorial creation. The result is the creation of new visual memories of experience that allows her to connect the abstract with the raw realities of life.
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Chantal uses the ancient form of abstraction as the language that will gesture her concerns around the political sphere by observing the history of power within social constructs and its shifting relations. Her challenge as such remains how to express the abstract in thought by tapping into the complexity of the human condition. Oils, stone, watercolours, charcoals and inks are some of the materials she has taken to focus on the human psyche as seen through the prism of colour.
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Chantal’s works have been exhibited in more than 30 group and Individual Exhibitions in prominent Museums and Galleries in Mexico, United Kingdom, Paraguay and Germany such as: Chiapas Museum of Science and Technology (Mexico), National Art Museum (Mexico), Centro Cultural Juan de Salazar (Paraguay) Museum of Modern Art (Mexico) Pembroke JCR Art Gallery (United Kingdom) Watercolour National Museum (Mexico) Arocena Museum (Coahuila) Karlstorbahnhof (Germany) Arroyo de la Plata Gallery (Zacatecas) Popular Art Museum (Mexico) MOMA Machynlleth (Wales) Guadalupe Museum (Zacatecas) Pape Museum (Cohauila) University Cultural Complex (Puebla) among others.
She has also been commissioned to produce public works, interventions, while providing requested donations of works to institutions and non-governmental organisations.
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Chantal’s State of Disappearance series, which was created between 2017-2023 has been exhibited in a solo show in Bristol and also in London. Having been gifted to the University of Bath, it is now on permanent display at the prestigious Chancellors Building at the Claverton Down campus. Her solo Eden Bleeds show was exhibited at St Marys Cathedral, Redcliffe, Bristol, during March/April 2025. Featuring 13 large works, it was the first contemporary art exhibition in the iconic venues 800-year history and was featured on the annual BBC 1 Easter Sunday Service live morning broadcast.
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As part of her ongoing interest in the educative value of art, she has delivered many international lectures, panels and artists talks at reputable universities such as Harvard University; the University of Oxford, École Normale Superiéure, Paris; University College London (UCL); the University of Bath; and Goethe Univeristät, Frankfurt. Chantal has also engaged in a series of public talks, including most recently with the multi-grammy winning Panamanian musician Rubén Blades. She has written extensively on the links between Art and Politics, while featuring on prominent news outlets such as the BBC’s news and arts programmes. Her work appears in many international publications and on book/magazine covers, including The Philosopher, Penguin Books, Columbia University Press, Review of Education Pedagogy and Cultural Studies, La Jornada, Trebuchet, W&F Science & Peace, Bloomsbury, Thesis Eleven, LA Review of Books and American Book Review, among others.
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​Having presented her work in an individual curated exhibition at the age of 20, since then Chantal's work has received considerable acclaim. Her work has received the support of grants, public recognitions and awards of prominent institutions in the cultural sector, among her current achievements include a notable public recognition for her contribution to culture in her province in Puebla, Mexico.​
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More recently, Chantal’s Disappearance of Worlds solo exhibition was held at the JCR gallery, Pembroke College, University of Oxford in June 2025. It was accompanied by a series of high-profile public events. “An incredible show that is remarkably powerful & extraordinarily poignant” was how the British journalist and renowned art critic Will Gompertz, described it. Adding, “It brings together an exceptional artist with a devastating subject in a way that is deeply profound." Artworks from the exhibition have been acquired by the University of Oxford for permanent public display at Pembroke College.
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For Chantal 'the shape of the abstract senses' remains a primary concern, as it gestures to what remains within and yet seems ungraspable. In her work a constant realisation remains, that in which what we are is never enough, perhaps too unreal that most of our intended actions are kept in the realm of the imagination. Mindful of this, she is confronted with a dilemma; showing how an abstract sensibility is all we could fleetingly possess.
In this regard, Chantal’s range of work offers visual dynamic confrontations, tapping into the complexity of the human condition. In a world dominated by Science and Technology, her paintings have become a mediation between the mystery and the unknown, letting her hands to become the bridge that transmits the inner most feelings to the external world.
As someone who believes in the art of life Chantal co-creates in this world with her soulmate, the Political Philosopher Brad Evans who inspires her to live as a constant explosion of shapes.