Daffodil (Daffodil Thief Series), 2024

Luisa Montoya is a Colombo-American artist based in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work explores the ordinary intimacy of outdoor and indoor spaces, focusing on how vegetation, gardens, and house plants retain traces of relationships, even those that have dissolved. Through painting from memory, observation, and oral descriptions, she collapses moments into single images. Her pictures blend observation, experience, fantasy, and language to represent the fragmentary yet ever-evolving nature of experience.

In Montoya’s real-time drawing and painting, each line and mark serves as a deliberate trace of experience, challenging viewers to question the boundary between perception and invention. This "trompe vérité" style involves constant editing and selective memory, extending into animation to create narratives that are both absurd and contemplative. Luisa’s work transcends traditional representation, engaging with the psychological aspects of painting and drawing to explore how we interact with and remember our surroundings.