Celina Eceiza:

Ofrenda

Cooperation: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires

18.10.2025–18.1.2026

Like an artificially created warm organism, the installation seems strangely alive and mobile, so that visitors find themselves within a setting where the objects they encounter and the impressions they make gradually change. Both the statics and the stability of the building start to shake, and fixed architectural elements seem to abandon their usual functions and uses. This cheerful all-encompassing installation makes the late-modernist architecture of the museum with its orthogonal white walls unrecognizable, and the strict white cube loses its habitual coordinates, dissolves into an intensive rush of color, and becomes a soft (an)organic body that can be experienced.

All the works in this show, from the floor to the ceiling, are draped with hundreds of meters of cloth, all interconnected by means of the collective and timeless cultural practice of sewing and thus forming one single closed surface. This painted ​“skin,” its metaphorical ​“folds,” and the organic insertions are resilient while also reactive to changes. A metabolic force determines the development of Eceiza’s work, which includes paintings, drawings, and sculptures that can range from the very small to the very large, and from the delicate to the elementary. In these works, the artist combines techniques and processes from textiles production, proceeding meticulously by hand and adding elements of patchwork, collages with found objects, and more recently also using gypsum and chalk pastels that give her pictures surprising ambiguity ranging from suggestive presence to fluid ephemerality. Her compositions are rich in fragments of bodies in transformation, as well as flowers and fruits in the still-life tradition. Her works flow into one another, with reference to art movements of the twentieth century and other themes from cultural history, including Ancient Rome and mythological and religious allusions, as well as references to critical political, social, and artistic movements across the rich and complex background of Argentinian history.

Celina Eceiza’s installations invite us to participate in pleasant, transparent, and expansive environments. As if they were fantastic ideas that have been put into practice, her generously designed spaces can be felt by visitors very directly and physically, as haptic experiences beyond purely rational approaches. This intimate and at the same time collective experience demonstrates the political force of Eceiza’s work, in which art is a living form that has to be nurtured in order to develop potentially new connections between people.

The artist’s approach draws on the popular practice in Argentina since the 1960s and 1970s of extending the spaces of art robustly into social contexts and public debate, based on an expanded understanding and an independent interpretation of modernity and a deepened interest in social and political issues, and above all not shying away from more radical positions and alternative designs, including all-encompassing total works of art. This drive toward public discourse and criticism of repeatedly problematic constellations of power and the aesthetic and thematic decisions engendered by these make exploration of recent Latin-American art so fruitful for artists today. In this context, museum collections play a significant role in selecting and addressing art from the past, a role that the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires and its director Victoria Noordthoorn have particularly embraced, so that their work has been invaluable for the research and practice of artists and other interested stakeholders.

Celina Eceiza is here particularly interested in an alternative history to the usual images of modernism, which she locates in counter-narratives and practices of resistance in production by artists not focused on representation or the academy. Among the artists that Eceiza sees as historically crucial in this context are Alberto Heredia, Juan Del Prete / Yente, or Nicolás Gracía Uriburu, whose sustained influence was especially due to their oppositional politics and independent artistic production. Eceiza has drawn inspiration from the museum’s collection, focusing mainly on paintings and transferring images from these onto new works by using delicately interwoven textiles in resplendent collaged forms. Her exhibition begins with a kind of freely interpreted gallery of her artistic ancestors presented against a bright yellow background — her introduction to her own personal history of Argentinian art.

In the main gallery, the artist uses outsized fantastic designs to play with surprising and humorous variations and depictions of human bodies. As if in a brightly colored cabinet of mirrors that has been swallowed by a great creature — or a rather over-ambitious art museum — we advance between diverse bodies brought together in a strange convention, and we seem to get closer and closer to them. They are neither threatening nor didactic; instead they refreshingly remind us of the potential of our own bodies and invite us to socially interact with others communicatively and directly.

The energy of Argentina again makes central Europe seem somewhat antiquated. This is why looking to afar is so appealing and liberating, particularly when considering Buenos Aires — the spacious port city of ​“fair winds” and its inhabitants whom no crisis can put down, the people known as porteños and porteñas who constantly reinterpret and bring to life their rich and diverse traditions as in no other city. A sense of the body, both in individual and social contexts, is key here. In Ofrenda, Celina Eceiza presents a rare gift that offers hope and a joy for life in difficult times. She shows true color: as if into a mysterious and richly decorated cavern, far away from ordinary time and space, we enter into Eceiza’s fantastic world with its impulsive inhabitants, and we leave it again with having more freely experienced our own bodies and their social power.