Celina Eceiza
Ofrenda

A metabolic force governs the growth of Eceiza’s work, which involves textile collages, sculptures, paintings and drawings — both tiny and colossal in scale — as laborious as they are elementary. The artist combines handcrafted textile techniques and processes such as patchwork, found object collages and, more recently, chalk pastels, which give her images a new sense of fluidity. Her compositions are filled with soft shapes, contorting bodies, flowers and fruits in the best still life tradition. They are interwoven with references to 20th century art movements as well as several layers of cultural history, including Greco-Roman antiquity and the hippy movement of the 1960s.

For this installation, Eceiza delved into an investigation of the Museo Moderno’s collection, focusing mainly on its paintings. She then reinterpreted these works in new pieces, using delicately interwoven textiles in resplendent collaged forms to showcase her own reading of Argentinian modern art history. She selected her favourite works and refashioned them into fan art posters, to share the artists and works she cherishes with the world. The entrance to the installation is a yellow sun-lit room that presents the images she loves, with works from an alternative history shown alongside renowned images of modern art from Argentinian artists such as Alberto Heredia, Juan del Prete, Yente and Nicolás García Uriburu, to name but a few, whose influence has endured due to their oppositional politics and independent artistic productions.

Ofrenda’s red room is filled with numerous gigantic chalk drawings on canvas and hand-dyed fabrics and carpets. The compositions are highly symbolic, depicting different beings and bodies undergoing transformations. In this space, this painterly ​“skin” with its metaphorical wrinkles and folds feels organic; it is resilient and yet delicate. It is this fragility that lies at the crux of Eceiza’s work. She constructs a ​“soft” museum in which seeing is no longer the only or most important sense to be engaged. Vision may remain the basis of knowledge, but Eceiza brings touch and the haptic experience to the foreground. In these works of art that one can walk into and be completely enveloped, the artist refers to esoteric and spiritual ideas of an expanded universe that integrates energies, combining the physical and material with the immaterial and even transcendent forms of life, while also creating a museum space with lower thresholds of access. 

Exhibition Page