Offering

The Museo Moderno is proud to present the first solo show in a museum in Argentina by young artist Celina Eceiza (Tandil, 1988). This ambitious, immersive project has been wholly produced by the Moderno. Ofrenda [Offering] presents a way of inhabiting a space as if the architecture were a body, breathing erratically, shaking and 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 paintings, drawings, and sculptures, both tiny and colossal in scale, as laborious as they are elementary. In them, the artist combines handcrafted textile techniques and processes such as patchwork, collages made of collected objects and, more recently, plaster and chalk pastels, which give her images a new sense of fluidity. Her compositions are filled with soft shapes, fragments of bodies undergoing transformations, 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, early Christianity, and the hippy movement of the 1960s.

Celina Eceiza’s installations invite you to partake in pleasant, porous and expansive environments. 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.