GRAZ.- HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, in cooperation with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, presents the first solo exhibition in a museum in Europe of the work of Argentinian artist Celina Eceiza (*1988, Tandil, Argentina, lives in Buenos Aires). Ofrenda [Offering] 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 Moderno 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.

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.

The artist’s approach draws on popular practices in Argentina and abroad since the 1960s, when art spaces began expanding robustly into social contexts. Early Argentinian environments such as Marta Minujín and Rubén Santantonín’s La Menesunda (1965) come to mind as a seminal work that pushed the boundaries of art to create something that can be experienced with all the senses.

Eceiza creates rooms that are to be inhabited and enjoyed by others, providing numerous cushions on the floor to rest and an invitation to reconsider idleness as a positive, uplifting activity. Her installations invite us to partake in pleasant, porous and expansive soft architectures. Constructed as if they were states of mind, these spaces yearn to be experienced by a body that forgets its rational nature and gives way to the pure will of sensitive knowledge. This intimate and, at the same time, collective experience displays its political power by presenting art as a living form that must be nurtured in order to reveal new possible links between humans.

The energy of Argentina and 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 called porteños and porteñas who constantly reinterpret and bring to life their rich and diverse traditions as in no other city. The 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, especially in times of scarcity. We enter Eceiza’s fantastic world, filled with impulsive inhabitants, and leave transformed, having experienced a freer vision of our own bodies and their social power.

Celina Eceiza (*1988, Tandil, Argentina, lives in Buenos Aires)

Solo exhibitions (selection): Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires (2024), Moria Galería, Buenos Aires (2023, 2021, 2018), Mundo Dios, Mar del Plata (2023), Móvil arte contemporáneo, Buenos Aires (2019), Jamaica ATR Gallery, Rosario, Argentina (2019), Big Sur Galería, Buenos Aires (2015).

Group exhibitions (selection): 18th Istanbul Biennial (2025), Móvil arte contemporáneo, Buenos Aires (2024), Bienal de Arte Textil, Sede Centro Cultural CEINA, Santiago de Chile (2023), UB-Anderson Gallery, Buffalo (2022), Microespacio Museo Petorutti, La Plata (2022), Museo del traje de Buenos Aires (2022), Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha (2021), Galería Belgrado, Buenos Aires (2021), Athens Institute for Contemporary Arts, Georgia (2021), Galería Nora Fisch, Buenos Aires (2021).

Curated by Sandro Droschl in collaboration with Agustina Vizcarra