The Textile as an Organic Body

In Ofrenda, Celina Eceiza presents a way of inhabiting a space as if the architecture were a body, breathing erratically, changing states as you pass from one room to the next. The rigidity of the building collapses as the walls are draped in thousands of metres of fabric joined together through the collective and timeless action of sewing, until they form a single smooth surface, sensitive to the slightest change. 

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.

This exhibition presents two of the spaces created for Ofrenda, the large-scale solo project curated by Jimena Ferreiro at the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires in 2024, which was the result of an entire year of laborious work and was Eceiza’s most ambitious installation to that date. The museum sought to work with Eceiza because of her unique capacity to transform spaces into rooms for social gatherings. On that occasion, the artist draped walls, ceilings and floors with hundreds of hand-dyed fabrics, using sewing both to bring all of the elements together — as if she were producing a bespoke suit for the building — and to create her rich imagery.

Eceiza weaves together fragments of history into a patchwork, revealing the connections between them and presenting them collectively. The process happens almost spontaneously: she begins by bleaching and sewing fabrics, thus creating new connections and juxtapositions. Her work as a whole can be compared to quilting — the age-old practice that originated in China and reached Europe around the 14th century — in which multilayered textiles are stitched together, assembling stories that can be passed on to others.