Feliciano Centurión: The Eternal Thread

Cecilia Brunson Projects is pleased to present The Eternal Thread, an exhibition of six works by Feliciano Centurión (1962–1996), organised in close collaboration with the artist’s family. Dating from the 1990s, the works reflect a period in which Centurión’s practice became increasingly intimate in scale and personal in subject. Following his HIV diagnosis in 1992, blankets, garments and fragments of cloth became a means of exploring love, illness, faith, memory and the body.

Centurión had long worked with domestic textiles, drawing on the sewing, knitting and crochet he learned within his family in Paraguay. In these later works, however, such materials took on a new urgency. The large painted blankets of the preceding years gave way to smaller, hand-worked objects that could be held close to the body. Embroidery, devotional imagery, flowers, insects and familiar fabrics formed a language at once private and expansive, in which tenderness and humour coexist with an acute awareness of mortality.

Created at a time when HIV/AIDS was surrounded by fear, stigma and moral judgement, these works refuse despair. Centurión met vulnerability with softness, care and beauty, transforming modest materials into expressions of spiritual and emotional resilience. Through these works, Centurión turned domestic materials into forms of protection and devotion, finding in the smallest gestures an enduring insistence on life.

Feliciano Centurión (b. 1962, San Ignacio Guazú, Paraguay; d. 1996, Buenos Aires) has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions and presentations including Feliciano Centurión: Sol naciente, Ortuzar, New York (2025); Feliciano Centurión: Hope in Bloom, Cecilia Brunson Projects, London (2024); Telas y Textos, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, New York (2023); Ñande Róga, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2021); Abrigo, Americas Society, New York (2020); and Affective Affinities, 33rd São Paulo Biennial, São Paulo (2018). Recent group exhibitions and collection presentations include Contemporary Art: 1975-Present, a presentation of the permanent collection at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid (2026); The River that Covers Me, Cecilia Brunson Projects, London (2025); Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, Barbican Centre, London, and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2024-25); Threads to the South, Institute for Studies on Latin American Art (ISLAA), New York (2024); Eros Rising: Visions of the Erotic in Latin American Art, ISLAA, New York (2022); and Bodies of Water, 13th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai (2021). His work is held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; MALBA–Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires; Museo Castagnino+Macro, Rosario; and Centro de Artes Visuales/Museo del Barro, Asunción. Working closely with the artist’s family, Cecilia Brunson Projects represents the Estate of Feliciano Centurión.

Download CV

Enquiries