Pozantı draws inspiration from her natural surroundings.
Hayal Pozantı’s latest solo exhibition, The World For a Mirror, was the inaugural show at the new Timothy Taylor gallery in New York, in April and May 2023.
For the past decade, Pozantı created abstract paintings based on a cipher alphabet she invented called “Instant Paradise”. Inspired by ancient Sumerian, Arabic and Hebrew, she translated data statistics into geometric paintings that commented on society’s reliance on technology.
Pozantı states that her paintings in the Timothy Taylor exhibition evolved into their own colorful, alien worlds in a way she couldn’t have predicted: “I compare it to the difference between cells and DNA. The ciphers still appear in my paintings because I had internalized them so deeply. But for this show, I wanted those static forms to come alive and move like organic beings.”
This change may have been triggered by her relocation: “Leaving New York transformed my practice. I’d always lived in cities, and my paintings reflected their urban hardness; I spent long periods of time on the computer to create initial designs. This analytical process began to feel claustrophobic. Then I moved to Los Angeles, later Vermont. Suddenly I owned a flower garden, rivers and mountains and streams flow by my studio window, and animals come right up to your hand. It feels untouched, which led me to stop using acrylics as I began thinking more about my responsibility to preserve this beautiful, open land. I create studies outside now, looking at the plants and sky all around me. This shift to painting with my hands, using oil sticks, has given me the freedom to create images that seem to come straight from the body.”
Published July 2023
