True to her practice, Hayal Pozanti made all 12 whorling paintings in Pleasures Newly Found, her exhibition at Jessica Silverman on view through May 31, by her mixing the paint on the canvas with her fingers. She used an oil stick rather than a paintbrush to make her nature-saturated works rich with plants, mountains, and night landscapes.
In fact, Pozanti has been making work in this way since she moved to the mountains of Vermont five years ago. It’s a little like finger-painting, she says, that gives her the feeling that there’s nothing between her and the canvas.
“Even using a brush or putting things into tubes—this felt so much more visceral and immediate,” she told 48 Hills. “That was really important to me, to have that experience.”
Pozanti adds that her palette has changed since moving to Vermont, where she observes greens and blues in nature that she’d never seen before.
Born in Istanbul, Pozanti has always been inventive in her painting style. When she was getting her MFA at Yale University, she thought a lot about how people experienced artwork online before seeing it in person. She wanted people to slow down and look more carefully.
“I thought, ‘OK, I need to interject this feed with something that has never been seen before,’ so I need to make new shapes,” Pozanti said. “I did a lot of research, and I found a method that worked for me.”
The artist, who has gotten public projects and commission from organizations including the New York Public Library and Cleveland Clinic and Case Western in Ohio and has work in the permanent collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Jose Museum of Art, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, has gotten special career recognition recently. Her work was included in the 2024 edition of the Gwangju Biennale curated by Abby Chen and Naz Cuguoğlu of San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum, as well as this year’s Art Basel Hong Kong.
Pozanti said she enjoyed both cities and she was pleased with the global reception of her work.
“It’s made sense around the world, so that makes me happy because that’s a huge part of the reason why I wanted to create some kind of language,” she said. “I was interested in this idea of communicating beyond borders and cultures, and to try and see if we can share a common language, as naïve as that sounds.”
Pleasures Newly Found is the artist’s fifth show with the gallery. She first met Silverman in 2011 after a collector came to Pozanti’s studio at Yale, loved her work, and said Silverman would be the perfect person to work with her. Throughout the iterations of Pozanti’s career, Silverman has steadfastly supported her, says that painter.
“It was very organic. We started working together almost immediately,” Pozanti says. “What I like about working with Jessica is she’s incredibly ambitious and works very hard for her artists. I appreciate that.”
The paintings on the wall of the gallery, with names like An Invisible Cloak to Mind Your Life (2025) or Daylight Licked Into Shape (2025), are sensuous and mesmerizing. How gratifying that Pozanti’s attention to the digital representation of her art led her back to physicality, to painting with her body, bringing us into a world full of nature and color.
HAYLA POZANTI: PLEASURES NEWLY FOUND runs through May 31. Jessica Silverman, SF. More info here.
