Words Lizzie Simon Photography Chris Mottalini

Published in No 20

Born and raised in Istanbul, Hayal Pozanti's development as an artist has led her across continents, from Turkey to New York and Los Angeles to her current home in Manchester, Vermont, where now at 41, she finds herself in near constant collaboration with nature. Her paintings, lush and dreamy, evoke flowers, natural landscapes and the subconscious in pretty tones of blue and pink. “It really is very much about me feeling incredible awe and wonder in the energy and the vibration and the musicality I feel when I'm in the natural world,” she said.

 She’s fascinated with the way that plants and animals relate to each other and with the world around them, with what makes their intelligence unique, with what they might have to teach human beings. Being immersed in the forest creates in Pozanti an urge to record it. “And because I'm a visual artist, I record it visually.”

Pozanti believes that art has the power to transform our perceptions, even if only for a brief moment, that art can serve as a bridge to a more embodied, connected experience of the world. And in an era when much of our interaction happens through screens, she worries that humanity is losing its capacity to truly feel and experience life. “We’re looking at flatness,” she said. “Our perception of the world has flattened out.” She hopes that her work invites the viewer to engage with nature in a more intimate way. “We are not just information-processing machines,” Pozanti said. “We are sensual beings.”

Her own practice is an antidote to this disembodiment, a return to a more primal way of being —one that involves engaging the senses fully and without mediation. Pozanti eschews acrylics, because they’re plastic-based and uses Shiva brand oil-based sticks. “They’re just pigment and oil and they dry very quickly. So, it also encourages me to be very present in the moment, because they dry within a day, at the most.” She paints with her fingers, thereby engaging directly with the materiality of the paint itself, a process she likens to cave painting — an ancient, primal act of creation. She starts with a small sketch, working out the shapes and colors, before transporting the image to a canvas. The large scale of her work — with some of her canvases as large as 120 x 80 inches — also plays a crucial role in grounding her physical presence in the act of making, requiring her to be in her body as she paints.

A central element of Pozanti’s work is her vivid color palette — an intuitive, emotional language, drawing from a range of influences from the natural world to art history, personal memories, and even dreams. “I know what colors make me feel certain kinds of things,” she says of her choices. It’s a process that unfolds as she mixes her paints directly on the canvas. 

In conversation, she’s engaging and reflective, weaving together ideas about embodiment, the loss of connection to nature, and the shifting landscape of human intelligence in the age of technology. It’s not surprising that she’s an avid reader and poet. It’s not surprising that her childhood home was rich in conversation and debate, or that in high school, she excelled at the Model United Nations. More practice came with earning her MFA at Yale where, she said, “even though they're like, Stop explaining yourself, you are explaining yourself constantly.”

Her directness notwithstanding, Pozanti pushes back when I ask her for the names of artists she feels have most influenced the work she’s doing. “This is a hard question for me to answer because at the moment I’m making a sketch, I tend to flicker between hundreds of paintings and artists whose works have made an impression on me. There are just too many specific moments and colors to name. We’re talking an extensive and endless image archive in my brain spanning 30 years and ongoing! This is why I’d like to leave the viewers to make their own art historical connections."

Pozanti’s life in Vermont is another source of inspiration. When the pandemic struck, she and her husband, Nelson Harmon were living in Los Angeles, where he had co-founded the gallery Château Shatto. They decided to move back to the East Coast, ultimately settling in Manchester where Harmon grew up. “I missed seasons,” she admits.

Manchester is a four-hour drive from New York City and has a population of about 4,500 people. It has an art museum — Southern Vermont Arts Center — and a handful of galleries, but it’s not a destination visited by jet setting collectors, curators, art advisors. With its charming streets and tight-knit community, it appealed on multiple levels. "It's kind of like a little Bruegel painting, you know, the little church steeple and people in town. It has that magical feel to it.” Her studio is situated near a gas station, a bedding store, and a kitchen store. “So, I'm part of the town fabric which I really like.” She recalls artist Katharina Grosse extolling the benefits of artists being in the mix of society rather than apart from it in a cluster of fellow artists. “They shouldn't be closed off together somewhere else. Artists should be a part of everyone's daily life.”

The move to Vermont has allowed her to live and work at a slower pace, and in a rhythm closely tied to the natural world. In her weekday routine, she walks fifteen minutes to her studio, works the day in her studio and walks back home, where she has dinner with Harmon before the pair set out for an evening hike. On most weekends, they hike some more. Manchester sits between the Green Mountains and the Taconic Mountain Range and is home to Equinox Mountain, the highest peak. In their community, she and Harmon are known as the walking couple. “There’re so many trails and so many hikes. We're constantly hiking.”

The art market is international and Pozanti often travels for work. In the past year alone, she’s made monthly trips to New York City in addition to trips to Miami, London, Milan, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Seoul and Gwangju. Her artistic career was set in motion by a stroke of serendipity. During her last week at Yale, as she was preparing for graduation, a friend and classmate brought a collector named John Friedman to her studio. Friedman, immediately taken with her work, began making plans to introduce her to Jessica Silverman, whose eponymous San Francisco gallery has become one of the region’s most exciting homes for contemporary art, with a roster of artists that includes Judy Chicago and Loie Hollowell. It was a pivotal moment in her career, one that came not from deliberate planning but from the organic flow of events, much like the creative process itself. Pozanti has been represented by Silverman ever since.

Over time, demand for Pozanti’s work has grown. She has been awarded large-scale public projects and commissions by the New York Public Library, the Public Art Fund, Cleveland Clinic and Case Western. She’s had solo shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. And her work is in the permanent collections of Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, San Jose Museum of Art and the Hammer Museum. In the fall 2024, she was one of 11 artists commissioned by Dior to use the designer’s iconic Lady Bag as a canvas. According to the press release, Pozanti’s bag “riffs on her passion for hiking by including sheepskin inserts and feet meant to mimic walking poles.” Pozanti described it as a very enjoyable, collaborative process. “We adapted three existing paintings into bags using the savoir faire of the house of Dior. It was exciting to adapt my paintings into different materials and a three-dimensional sculptural idea that can float out in the world separate of the gallery / museum space.” 

Silverman will be mounting a show of Pozanti’s newest series of paintings in April. “When I first encountered Hayal’s work,” Silverman said, “I was struck by her extraordinary color combinations and shapes. Hayal is attentive to the world around her and attuned to what is seen and what is felt. With a heightened awareness, she expresses the sensorial qualities of flowers, trees, wind and water through paint. I was also struck by her love of making paintings — a pure joy and comfort of being an artist.” 

Through her vivid paintings, Pozanti invites us to reconnect with the natural world, to sense it not just with our eyes but with our bodies and hearts. In a time when our lives are increasingly mediated by screens and technology, Pozanti’s work reminds us of the power of touch, presence, and the embodied experience of living on this planet. Said Silverman: “With invigorating color and sweeping gestural markings, Hayal’s lush landscapes have a sensorial effect, inviting us to feel, smell, listen and be enraptured. Her works connect us to the natural world on a visceral level, reminding us that our own existence is intricately connected to the health of our planet.”

Hayal Pozanti's solo exhibition on view April 15 – May 31, ’25 at jessicasilvermangallery.com

Lizzie Simon is a former arts columnist for The Wall St Journal and the author of the memoir, Detour. Her arts and culture newsletter, Lizzie’s Letter, can be found on Substack. www.lizziesimon.info

Chris Mottalini is a regular contributor to UD. Chrismottalini.com