Pozanti’s first solo exhibition with the gallery will open in New York in April 2023 - and will be the first exhibition at the gallery’s new 6,000-square-foot space in the city, located at 74 Leonard Street in Tribeca.
Lush organic forms swirl across Hayal Pozanti’s paintings, which express a vision of botanical growth outside of human exceptionalism. The orbs, curves and lakes in her work seem to contain every hue found in nature: a trumpet-shaped form burns with the fiery light of the Sahara desert; a wavering line vibrates the deep turquoise of a California swimming pool, each shape sealed within a thin hermetic border. Colours echo, reflect and mirror each other at different points across the canvas, leading the viewer’s eye with a strange geometry that reflects an imaginary universe grown from the subconscious and inspired by science fiction. Pozanti’s practice has developed in step with her changing way of life. As an artist working in New York in the early 2010s, Pozanti created a system of shapes and ciphers to translate fragments of statistics and images she discovered deep in the internet, relating our frightening reliance on technology and numbers in bright geometric paintings. Yet with a move to Los Angeles, then Vermont, Pozanti began to paint en plein air, growing sensitive to the animals, spiders, plants and trees living in close range of her easel.
Fuelled by an ethical urgency to discover a different way of life, Pozanti’s paintings broke new ground with a lyrical form of abstraction in clear, jewel-like colours. The original ciphers, which Pozanti describes as “building blocks”, evolved into a rich and more organic abstract universe in which unknown plants and animals flourish and reign. Pozanti looked to ancient Samarian, Sanskrit and Hebrew alphabets to create this broader visual language: links that remind us that it is possible to dream of utopian societies outside of the Western model.
Pozanti follows through on her ecological ambitions in the studio, giving up acrylics for natural oil paints and non-toxic materials. The biomorphic shapes in Pozanti’s work echo the work of Wassily Kandinsky and Jean Arp, both of whom believed it was necessary to create a completely abstract world to distil spiritual longing for the modern viewer.
“In Los Angeles, the smoke, fire and the pandemic felt apocalyptic. I had been interested in investigating artificial intelligence and technology, but I came away feeling that touch, sense, image cannot be mapped and commodified. That’s not how we experience the world ... It comes to seem almost revolutionary in our world to use intuition as a way of making choices” - Pozanti
Hayal Pozanti (b. 1983, Istanbul, Turkey) has a BA from Sabanci University and an MFA from Yale University. She has been awarded large-scale public projects and commissions by the New York Public Library, NY; Public Art Fund, New York, NY and Cleveland Clinic and Case Western, Cleveland. Her work has been presented in institutional solo shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. Her work is in the permanent collections of: Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); San Jose Museum of Art; and the Hammer Museum. Pozanti had her last solo exhibition ‘Lingering’ in 2022 at Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Pozanti lives and works in Manchester, VT.
Pozanti will continue to be represented by Jessica Silverman Gallery.
photo: Didem Civginoglu
