Hayal Pozanti: A Dream That Rhymed With Mine

Timothy Taylor is pleased to present A Dream That Rhymed With Mine, an exhibition of new paintings by Hayal Pozanti, in London. The exhibition brings together paintings and works on paper made over the past year and marks the artist's second solo exhibition in the UK and third with the gallery.

Over the past decade, Pozanti has developed a distinctive formal language of biomorphic abstraction, translating her experience of the natural world into a vocabulary entirely her own. Working with oil stick and oil pastel directly on canvas and blending pigment by hand, she builds forms that shift fluidly between flower, body, and current, resisting fixed identity in favour of continuous transformation. Rather than depict nature, Pozanti renders its feeling—an impulse inspired in part by Surrealism, with its dreams and its drive to invent new worlds.

Though rooted in the everyday, Pozanti's paintings are not literal transcriptions of the material world. Her attention to her environment is acute, almost synesthetic, drawn again and again toward small details that catch and hold the light. For the artist, such objects become “altars”: “the transcendence of a mountain and the tickle of bodega flowers," she has said, "can hold the same significance.” In her work, both are axis mundi—points where the earthly and the sacred meet.  

In several works in the presentation, a vessel holds a moment of stillness within the motion of the larger composition. In The Endless Whisper of Their Warm Bodies (2026), a dark red vase anchors the canvas before its contents spill outward into loose forms glowing turquoise, coral, gold, and violet against a night sky streaked with light. Elsewhere, the paintings dispense with any anchor at all. In one landscape canvas, All That Shines Outside of Itself (2026), blossoms in cream, red, and lilac open against a deep teal-black ground, petals trailing into ribbons of turquoise beneath streaks of light. A related work, Your Laughter That Suddens Me (2026), takes up the same freedom: coral and orange blooms unfurl against a dark ground, tendrils of pale blue and gold looping around them, a pool of red gathering below. Where her vessel paintings hold a pause, these remain in constant motion, each form answering the one beside it.

In creating these paintings, Pozanti draws from the working of a flower itself, which weaves disparate forms of life into partnership, connecting soil microbes and fungi below with the work of pollinating insects and birds above. Her own paintings, she suggests, work the same way—as places where forces ordinary and spiritual meet.