Daniela Garcia
About Daniela
Instagram: @ilustraniela
Daniela García Isea was born in Quito in 1996, but she grew up in Madrid from the age of five. In 2021, she moved to Amsterdam, where she currently lives and where she has given true space to her artistic side—something that has been an intrinsic part of her for as long as she can remember.
Her artistic practice centers around digital collage—a medium through which she reinterprets and reinvents photographs by layering textures, colors, and hand-drawn lines. Using Procreate on her tablet, she manually intervenes in these images, drawing directly onto them with expressive lines, patterns, and details that breathe new life into frozen moments. Each piece is an attempt to bridge eras: connecting the past with the present and opening a visual conversation with the future.
Photography and drawing are her two great passions, and they intertwine seamlessly in her work. She has always felt that both are ways of freezing moments in time, of stopping the clock, if only for an instant. They are tools for returning to the past, for time-traveling through images, and for reconstructing narratives from a visual and emotional perspective.
Although she often works with old or archival photographs, she also uses more contemporary images—especially when they are in black and white. The absence of color helps evoke the same sense of nostalgia, allowing the modern to feel timeless and emotionally resonant. Her aim is to reframe these images through a lens that connects different eras and invites new interpretations.
She is particularly drawn to anonymous portraits and everyday scenes that carry an aura of mystery. These images speak to her not only as historical documents but as emotional landscapes—fragments of lives that once existed and still echo in subtle, powerful ways. Through her process, she seeks to amplify those echoes: to highlight the gesture of a hand, the detail of a garment, the expression of a face. Color and line become tools to awaken what lies dormant in the image and reinterpret it with contemporary meaning.
While the female presence appears often in her work, it is not always the central focus. She is particularly interested in how identity—especially historically marginalized identities—survive and transform across generations. Sometimes she incorporates her own face or image into the collages as a way of exploring how personal memory intertwines with collective history. In this sense, her work is both intimate and universal.
Her work has been part of group exhibitions in various spaces in Amsterdam, including MEININGER Hotel Amsterdam City West, Bartheo, Tillatec, and What is Happening Here Gallery, as well as internationally at Golden Duck Gallery in Budapest. She is always seeking new opportunities to share her work and to open dialogues about memory, identity, and the power of visual storytelling.
Ultimately, she strives to give new voice to these photographs—whether old or modern—a voice that feels more alive, more current, and perhaps more honest. She invites the viewer to pause and ask themselves: Who were these people? What did they dream of? And what part of them still lives in us today?
