The World Sang Through Me

With rich jewel tones and swooping, dancing forms that evoke leaves, petals, and otherworldly landscapes, Hayal Pozanti’s paintings seem to vibrate with energy as they conjure the sensate experience of the natural world.

Sensation is a key element of Pozanti’s practice, as she makes her paintings by mixing colors not on a palette but by blending oilstick directly into the canvas with her fingertips. This direct physical contact unlocks a fluid connection between brain and hand, allowing Pozanti to play with intuition and the embodied experience of existing in the world.

In spite of the tangibility and physicality of her process and the grounding force of touch that is present in the work, Pozanti’s paintings have a quality that feels ephemeral, like a phrase of music hanging in the air. Forms move across the canvas like notes on a sheet of music, but unlike musical compositions, these are written in a language of color and form.

Since moving from Los Angeles to Vermont during the COVID-19 pandemic, Pozanti has felt her connection to nature intensifying. She works en plein air, creating small oil pastel studies that subsequently get transformed into large paintings back in the studio. Walks in the woods, time spent in the garden, the brook that runs outside her studio—all are present in Pozanti’s paintings, rendered in ways that distill her experiences into pure energy and ecstasy.

The World Sang Through Me invites us to enter a realm of consciousness where our senses are heightened to a new alertness of both the world Pozanti has created and the one around us.

— Sarah Freeman, curator

About the Artist

Hayal Pozanti is a Turkish-born artist who lives and works in Manchester, Vermont. Using oil stick and oil pastel with a sculptural approach, Pozanti creates swirling, organic forms that rise and fall in waves of deep, jewel-toned hues. Her compositions originate from a set of 31 discrete shapes she developed to function as icons in a personal lexicon. Over the past decade, these glyphs have evolved and softened from abstract calligraphic arrangements into new forms that suggest imaginary landscapes. Pozanti’s compositions are filled with amoeba-like shapes, suggesting mysterious biological life forms and abstract worlds that reflect universal truths about reality. She views painting as both a means of world-making and a way to be present in the world as it is.

In 2021, Pozanti created Instant Paradise, an 85-foot installation on the ceiling of the New York Public Library’s largest circulating branch, the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library in midtown Manhattan. Consisting of colorful, sculptural iterations of the 31 icons she developed, the installation is on permanent view at the library. Pozanti also represented the American Pavilion at the Gwangju Biennale in 2024, showcasing a series of sculptures exploring what it means to present Asian art in the U.S. at this time in history.

Portrait of Hayal Pozanti by Didem Civginoglu, courtesy of the artist and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Artwork Images

Thank You

Special thanks to Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Timothy Taylor, London, for their assistance with this exhibition.

Major support for The World Sang Through Me is provided by Christopher and Vimala Steadman, the Vilcek Foundation, and the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation.