Coproduction: Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires
25.10.2025–18.1.2026
HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, in cooperation with the Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires, is pleased to present the first solo exhibition in a museum in Europe of the work of Argentinian artist Celina Eceiza (*1988, Tandil, 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.
Celina Eceiza: Ofrenda is a co-production between HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark and Museo de Arte Moderno de Buenos Aires
Curated by Sandro Droschl in collaboration with Agustina Vizcarra
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.
A Soft Museum
Celina Eceiza’s Soft Museum is a walk-in, immersive space in which fabrics and carpets deconstruct the rigid, concrete rooms of the lower floor of the HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark — a late-modernist building from 1952 — while simultaneously questioning the premises and constructs associated with the emergence of such spaces in late modernity. The ideology of the White Cube — which often underpins these late-modernist spaces — can make art appear distant; as Brian O’Doherty wrote, the “ideal gallery suppresses all clues that might interfere with the fact that it is ‘art’.” The result is an “intensified presence” of the space itself, which carries something of “the sanctity of the church, the formal authority of the courtroom, the mystery of the laboratory,” turning it into a “unique cult space of aesthetics.” Indeed, the force fields of the White Cube are so strong that an “object becomes art” within it, only to lose value once it leaves its walls. Yet the object itself is usually no more than a medium for debating ideas. Moreover, the White Cube can make art harder to engage with, as it often establishes an unequal power dynamic between artwork and audience.
Eceiza’s recent practice focuses on handmade textiles and drawings in combination with sculptures and immersive installations. Her installations treat space as a metabolic organ that is capable of processing a range of physical, emotional, and psychological states, as well as practices, beliefs, desires, and rituals. Her concept is almost cosmological. Her approach to the soft museum and its soft architecture is not an attempt to isolate the elements of life, but to embrace them cosmopolitically and universally, assuming that the universe resides within all of us. Eceiza’s perspective is not anthropocentric, but animistic and mythological-spiritual, envisioning both humans and non-human beings — such as animals or plants — as continually reborn, existing in a constant cycle. For the Argentine artist, this gathering of different figures mirrors an ecosystem in which diverse agents depend on one another.
She also considers the audience as guests. Eceiza engages with perspectives that are not only social but also psychological, anthropological, and metaphysical. In doing so, she redefines hospitality as an artistic practice: visitors are not merely invited to view her work; they become part of it, transform it over the course of the exhibition, and are welcomed as guests who are encouraged to attune themselves to their environment and explore Eceiza’s unique energy in their own way.
To think softly also means viewing materials and spaces not as fixed entities, but as dynamic agents. Here, participation matters more than didactic teaching, and indeterminacy more than prescription. Above all, it is about dissolving the boundaries between the visitor and the museum space, between the formal and informal. Eceiza is acutely aware of the fragility of her soft museum, and understands visitors not only as guests to whom she offers a gift but also as agents who can examine and question their surroundings — and who might, through carelessness, come too close to its delicate objects. For Eceiza, however, this is part of the process of a fluid space of experience.
Thus, her soft museum oscillates between unconditional hospitality and the conditions that inevitably underlie every form of hospitality: between welcome and acceptance on the one hand, and institutional rules on the other. In Ofrenda, hospitality is not entirely free from conditions. Yet Eceiza offers visitors far more freedom than is usually the case in exhibitions: they may interact with the work, become part of it, touch it, lie down, linger, talk, read, or even take a siesta. What matters is that they adopt an attitude of care and attentiveness — care for both the work and for others. For these are indeed artworks and individuals, each deserving autonomy and subjectivity, and requiring respectful engagement. These ideas also resonate with the act of giving or receiving gifts, which likewise demands care and responsibility from both giver and recipient.
In this way, Eceiza engages with urgent questions of care, nurturing, and responsibility. These concerns also resonate on another level of hospitality in her work, in her references to Argentine artists of previous generations, whom she integrates into her exhibition. In doing so, she offers a special homage to these leading figures of Argentine art history, giving her work a truly radical dimension. One such figure to whom Eceiza often refers is Marta Minujín, who in 1973 created the so-called Soft Gallery by lining the walls of a space with around 200 white mattresses. Minujín, too, emphasized life itself, since people spend much of their lives on mattresses — sleeping, conceiving, being born, and often even dying on them. The Soft Gallery functioned both as an immersive installation and a stage, where Minujín invited poets, musicians, and performers to participate in events. Similarly, Celina Eceiza’s work can be understood as a soft museum. It begins upstairs with the tapestry-covered stairs in the foyer, leading into the basement of HALLE FÜR KUNST Steiermark, where she expands her organic universe into a tangible spatial experience. For Eceiza, intuition is key — something one feels not only metaphorically “in the head.” This is why her completely redesigned main hall seems almost to call upon visitors to trust their feelings and intuition rather than relying solely on reason.
The Solar Room, the Red Metabolism
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 favorite 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 her own versions of renowned and lesser known 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. Sewn into the fabric-covered walls of the lower level of the museum space, the textile collages invoke Tarjeta de felicitación by Pompeyo Audivert, Sol, luna y sol by Melé Bruniard, Composición by Yente, Juana by Germaine Derbecq, Astromutación by Raquel Forner, La familia by Noemí Gerstein, Chito y Peca by Juan Grela, Casa o escultura by Alberto Heredia, Pint 934 Limoesjos by Lido Iacopetti, Línea Continua by Enio Iommi, Sin Título by Alfredo Londaibere, Energía apagada by Aldo Paparella, Cabeza de señora by Juan del Prete, and Autobus 27 by Nicolás García Uriburu. Inspired by these artists, by New Age, and by the tie-dye technique, Celina Eceiza freely adopts concepts and forms, thereby expanding not only the conventional notion of art but also that of the museum space itself. Eceiza quite deliberately appropriates the practices of these artists, especially when seeking to better understand their approach. At the same time, she anticipates that other artists may find inspiration in her work, adopt it, and make use of it. For her, it is important that the artist be seen less as a solitary genius and more as someone who works within a network and a context, and that art always be understood in relation to social movements — something particularly relevant in Argentina. She also regards art as a tool capable of being engaged in investigating, representing, and healing experiences of violence, and as a medium of care, attention, and protection.
The artistic positions mentioned earlier are particularly relevant because, in art-historical terms, Celina Eceiza’s practices can be contextualized within this conceptual framework. For Eceiza, the goal is to constitute the Kunsthalle, the museum, in short — the institution — as a space of experience. 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. Minujín is also known for a completely different public work: the Parthenon of Books, which she inaugurated in Buenos Aires on December 19, 1983, after the return to democracy, and later recreated in 2017 for documenta 14 in Kassel. This work was realized with the active participation of members of the public, who contributed books that had been banned during the military dictatorship, making it a democratic project that directly involved civil society.
Although Eceiza’s selection is nonlinear and her interests include artists from very different generations, there is a common thread in terms of their engagement with the artistic – and often the political – counterculture. Eceiza also chose some works that might seem “minor,” as they are not necessarily the artists’ most renowned pieces. For instance, the Spanish-born Argentine artist Pompeyo Audivert (1900 – 1973) is best known for his copper engravings and his activities as a left-wing activist, yet Eceiza chose a postcard from the Museo Moderno’s collection. Germaine Derbecq (1899 – 1973) was a key figure in the development of the Neo-Avant-Garde of the 1960s, known for her expressionist paintings and later for her abstract-geometric style. Juan del Prete (1897 – 1987), a self-taught painter, photographer, draftsman, and sculptor, was a central figure in Argentine modern art. However, he never signed a manifesto and therefore belonged to no formal group. He was also the teacher — and later partner — of Eugenia Crenovich (1905 – 1990), better known as Yente, one of the first practicing female abstract painters and sculptors. While much of her work displays an abstract-geometric language, she too never joined a group. She also produced numerous collages, drawings, assemblages, and textiles, and remains a major source of inspiration for Eceiza, particularly as Yente had an ability to soften her geometry.
Juan Grela (1914 – 1990) and Melé Bruniard (1930 – 2020) are also essential to Eceiza. Grela’s almost surrealist paintings, combined with abstract-geometric and figurative forms, established him as a leading figure in Argentine art. He co-founded the Litoral Group in Rosario, Argentina’s third-largest city, and Melé Bruniard – his student and later partnerbecame one of Argentina’s most important artists in engraving and woodcut.
Ofrenda also features the Argentine sculptor and illustrator Noemí Gerstein (1910 – 1996). Gerstein is particularly noted for her abstract sculptures and her flat metal compositions, often resembling canvases. Enio Iommi (1926 – 2013) is likewise emblematic of Argentine sculpture. Early in his career, he created delicate sculptures composed solely of fine metal lines and curves; but from the 1990s onward, he produced monumental works incorporating found objects, such as toy cars. He was one of the founders of the Asociación Arte Concreto-Invención, breaking with the academic paradigms of the time.
Nicolás García Uriburu (1937 – 2016) was an artist, landscape architect, and ecologist. His Land Art sought to raise awareness of pollution. During the 1968 Venice Biennale – even though he was not an official participant – he dyed the water of the Grand Canal with a non-toxic fluorescent green to draw attention to water pollution. However, Eceiza selected one of his early pop and hippie paintings from 1966, showing a typical Buenos Aires bus with its decoration, a style known as the fileteado porteño.
The Argentine painter Lido Iacopetti (1936 – 2024), with his colorful, abstract worlds resembling dreamscapes, is also indispensable to Eceiza’s visual universe and appears to strongly influence her spatial constructions. Alfredo Londaibere (1955 – 2017), one of the most important artists of the 1990s and an LGBTQ activist during the AIDS crisis, is also honored by Eceiza. His colorful paintings and collages reused items such as soda cans, while his precise drawings took on darker, surrealist tones. His paintings, in their vivid coloration, at times appear to form a foundation for Eceiza’s soft museum.
Ofrenda’s red room proposes something entirely different. It 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. Eceiza weaves these bodies into her large-scale work as a single body, which then incorporates the bodies of the visitors themselves, thus creating a small universe imbued with a touch of humor in its vitality and a sense of comfort — qualities that are often lacking both in the outside world and within institutions themselves. 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 accessibility of Eceiza’s work — her unpretentious way of drawing upon various artistic positions and integrating them into her own work — both revisits Argentine art history and deliberately opposes the academicism that often renders art remote and inaccessible. Also worth mentioning here is Aldo Paparella (1920 – 1977), another Argentine artist of particular interest to Eceiza for his use of overlooked, nontraditional materials. A representative of Informalism, he created abstract sculptures from stone, wood, iron, and aluminum, working directly with the materials, particularly through engraving. There is also Alberto Heredia (1924 – 2000) — one of Argentina’s most signifi cant sculptors and a member of the Informalism movement — who, early on, collected everyday objects to make his sculptures. In doing so, he critically engaged with capitalism and consumer culture, while also exposing the censorship and narratives of Argentina’s military dictatorship. Informalism is also crucial for Eceiza, as suggested at the outset: textiles are everyday materials — often cheap, but also capable of being noble. It is precisely this everyday character and ambivalence that Eceiza seeks to capture in her overall body of work.
Thought Experiments and Living in Art
In Ofrenda, Eceiza is less concerned with merely stimulating the sense of sight than with creating a space of experience — a place where possibilities can be explored, much like a thought experiment in which individuals encounter one another. In an era marked by debates, conflicts, wars, economic crises, violence, famine, persecution, and inequality, the artist seeks to provide a calming, welcoming space of counterculture. She creates a situation in which visitors are permitted to reflect and find moments of rest, a space where they may linger, lie down, feel, and spend something that seems scarcely available: time.
According to Eceiza, this is an exhibition that is meant to be used. It is a space that offers many experiences to be made and nurtured. The arrangement and materiality of the space she has fabricated invites visitors to stay and spend time within it. It is also a place of reciprocity: it offers an experience for the senses but must be treated with respect and care, just like the other visitors. Against this backdrop, the site can also be understood as a space of experience: an immersive encounter that, within a microcosm, can be transferred to other situations and spaces — namely, a vision of a scenario that enables warmth, care, and respectful exchanges. With her immersive installation, Eceiza employs, much like Jorge Luis Borges in his texts that merge fiction and science, a fabulative speculation that may be capable of generating a reality that enables a gentler form of coexistence than what currently prevails.
In any case, as becomes clear in her reference to Marta Minujín’s La Menesunda, Eceiza’s aim is to create a place where visitors not only see the art but also experience it — and even live within it. It is not the aesthetics that bring her closer to Minujín, but the possibility of a true popular democratic art form. It is intended to simulate bodies within a body, inviting individuals to discover, within a situation of vita contemplativa, a space that enables a profoundly democratic gathering of the most diverse people. As Hannah Arendt argues, it is in the realm of the “in-between” where the potential to create something new can be realized, fulfilling the sense of politics as freedom. Arendt’s understanding of politics as a realm of the political is based on the plurality of people and must always be considered in light of her own devastating experiences with totalitarianism. From this very plurality, politics, according to her, thus takes place in this “in-between space” — between different and diverse individuals. And only in this way can there be a political response to the fragility of these affairs, that is, of all “human affairs,” by understanding politics as based on plurality and, consequently, as freedom.
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, perhaps even developing new perspectives that are less divisive and more reconciliatory.
Text by Caro Rebecca Feistritzer