ARAC and Anca Poterasu Gallery is back at Liste Art Basel for 2026, this time with a dedicated solo presentation of new works by Megan Dominescu, the tapestries that translate the noise of our hypermediated world into something soft, uncomfortable, and oddly familiar.
In 1967, Bruce Nauman placed a neon spiral in his studio window like a shop sign: The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths. He never quite said whether he meant it. That productive uncertainty — between genuine belief and self-aware absurdity, between the cosmic and the banal — is precisely where Megan Dominescu has set up camp.
Nauman’s gesture was deliberately misplaced: a grand declaration in a storefront, visible to anyone passing by, monumental in the most ordinary context possible. Dominescu inverts the move entirely. She takes the slowest, most archaic, most manual of mediums — hand-hooked tapestry on burlap, worked loop by loop — and fills it with the fastest, most disposable visual language available: the meme, the selfie, the doomscroll, the affirmation, the food blog live stream. Same paradox, opposite direction.
The Conduit (2026), the anchor of this presentation, stages the question physically: a turquoise creature — neither fully human nor animal, the kind of being that exists comfortably in both a medieval manuscript and a Reddit thread — reaches upward toward a spiralling sun that pulses with neon light. It stands on a classical plinth, solemnly ridiculous, caught mid-reach toward something it may or may not grasp. The Nauman phrase is stitched into the spiral itself, in wool, glowing. This is Dominescu’s method in concentrated form: the grand gesture rendered in burlap, the ephemeral made to last, the meme turned into an heirloom.
Born in the Netherlands to Romanian and American parents, raised in Washington D.C., living and working in Bucharest, Dominescu operates from constitutive displacement. No single cultural grammar is entirely native to her — which gives her the particular clarity of someone who belongs nowhere enough to be deceived by any of it. Her practice moves fluidly between handwoven tapestry, hand-felted wool, painting and installation, each work transforming the visual vernacular of internet culture into objects that carry the weight of things made slowly, by hand.
Liste Art Basel
Messe Basel, Hall 1.1 Maulbeerstrasse / corner, Riehenring 113, 4058 Basel, Switzerland
Monday 15 – Sunday 21 June 2026
Project co-financed by Ministry of Culture