Anca Poterasu Gallery presents for Art Brussels 2022, in the Invited Galleries section, recent work from the up-and-coming artist Megan Dominescu. Megan’s fresh outtake on contemporary rug hooking and embroidery tackles topics such as the representation of women in the media, ecological decay, and digital culture. 

The artist’s fiber art brings a humorous, yet thoughtful resolve to the absurdity of our political and social realities, empathically underlining the contemporary collectively-shared angst. 

During Art Brussels, Megan Dominescu’s rug-hooked embroideries tackle day-by-day anxiety. The external pressure to keep up with daily routine increases in a post-COVID pandemic world now filled with news of failing peace treaties and refugee crises across Eastern Europe, including Romania, where the artist currently lives and works.

Without directly referencing these events, the artist relates to the everyday person, especially to the women feeling trapped in the contrasting normalcy of domestic work, or portraying the inability to effectively cope with what may have once been freeing and easy-going social interactions. Brands, façade politeness, pyramid schemes disguised as friendly communities, and escapism take over, in a seemingly unending cycle of increasing detachment and apathy. 

In solidarity with the refugees from Ukraine, Anca Poterasu Gallery has invited the textile artist Tasha Vorontsovskaya to co-create with Megan Dominescu a textile installation that will be revealed at the opening of Art Brussels in the shared booth with lítost Gallery, INV.6.  Tasha Vorontsovskaya has spent one month in the artistic residency space of the gallery in Bucharest, seeking refuge from the war in Ukraine together with her daughter. The entire revenue from selling the co-created installation will be directed to the artist.

The shared booth of Anca Poterasu Gallery in Bucharest and litost Gallery in Prague presents the dialogue between artists Megan Dominescu and Marie Lukáčová. Megan’s textile art installations of rug-hooked colorful tapestries depict current overwhelming, collectively-felt anxiety. Marie’s print series titled ”Broth” is in turn inspired by the symbiotic and domestic exchange made between animals, plants and humans, linked in the endless cycle of need and want.

Both artists relate to the domestic aspect of either cooking or keeping up with tiresome, nowadays seemingly frivolous house chores and daily routines, associated with the inside-in lockdown of the quarantine, and the inside-out logic of the biology that dictates policies, restrictions, hierarchies. Whereas Megan Dominescu focuses on the psychological aspect of the chaotic psychological pressures of social encounters, predatory capitalist strategies, and increasing individualistic alienation, Marie Lukáčová conjures her own visceral mythology (or shamanism) of housework, interdependency with other living resources, and a world that is more than human, set on consumption, body, language, and desire.