Frieze Seoul 2024
September 4-7, 2024
Booth A3
Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce the gallery’s participation in Frieze Seoul for the fair’s 2024 edition with Hayal Pozanti’s first solo exhibition in Asia. Running from September 4 to 7, the presentation will comprise ten new paintings by the Istanbul-born artist. Pozanti is simultaneously featured in the American Pavilion at the 15th Gwangju Biennale.
Titled “Stay Here Ongoing,” Pozanti’s exhibition harnesses the rhythms of the natural world through a lyrical and inventive approach to painting. Observing the world around her for hours on end, Pozanti begins each painting with en plein air sketches. She paints on linen with oil sticks, using her fingers to convey movement and sensation through shape and color. Her own body functions as a channel, transmitting her sublime reverie of harmonized existence with the natural world into paintings she refers to as “love letters to the earth.”
At nearly seven-feet wide by five-feet tall, large scale works such as Water of a new life and Voices whispering secrets (both 2024) are landscapes bathed in moonlight. Pozanti’s transcendental use of color throughout these luminescent scenes is other-worldly. Scarlet red leaves and cerulean trees depict ranges of chromatic complexity within the color green, while a pink waterfall evokes the iridescence of light on water.
A long-time gallery artist, Pozanti rose to prominence in the 2010s for paintings using her own invented alphabet—31 shapes she called Instant Paradise. Often arranged to give form to complex human emotions in the machinic digital age, she has since evolved to use biomorphic forms inspired by ecological splendor, the subconscious, and organic beauty untouched by human intervention. These utopic depictions of mushrooms, flowers, butterflies, and other creatures are the DNA, or the building blocks, of her painterly environments.
Elsewhere, paintings like All the honey-sweetness (2024) use swirling lines to elicit movement and a sense of temporality. Suggesting an embodied experience of the world, this work reminds the viewer that wind blows, seasons change, and the world is always evolving. Here, soft hues of yellow, blue, pink, and green recall Monet, while Pozanti’s twilight paintings glow from within like a Carravagio. In Golden Slumber (2024), for example, blushing against a nocturnal background, flower petals close up and turn down for the night.
“Stay Here Ongoing” is an invitation to the viewer and to the non-human world. It’s a call to be in the present moment and hope for a future in which the natural world is thriving and abundant.
At the 15th Gwangju Biennale, running from August 30-December 1, 2024, Pozanti will present a grouping of three sculptures, entitled “Where Fragrant Sundowns Flower” (2024), that further her explorations of the world as she encounters it—a sensate, dreaming, interpretive subject.
Hayal Pozanti (b. 1983, Istanbul, Turkey) has a BA from Sabanci University and an MFA from Yale University. Her work is in the permanent collections of Eli & Edythe Broad Art Museum; East Lansing, MI; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA; and the Long Museum, Shanghai. She has been awarded large-scale public projects and commissions by the New York Public Library; Public Art Fund, New York and Cleveland Clinic and Case Western, OH. She has enjoyed institutional solo shows at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT and the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. Pozanti is included in the American Pavilion at the 2024 Gwangju Biennial. She lives and works in Manchester, VT. Pozanti is represented by Jessica Silverman, San Francisco and Timothy Taylor, London/New York.
