Image: Özer Kabaş in his room at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, circa 1970s. Salt Research, Özer Kabaş Archive
‘Across the Seas: Özer Kabaş and His Times’ examines the practice of artist, educator and writer Özer Kabaş (1934–1998), ranging from painting and design to film and theater, as well as his place in Turkey’s cultural history. Spanning the second and third floors of Salt Beyoğlu, the exhibition highlights Kabaş’s interest in various artistic disciplines, his approach to art education and his contributions to Turkey’s cultural landscape.
The exhibition features Kabaş’s paintings and original prints, jewelry he designed at the Urart Art Studio, his 1967 film ‘İstanbul Hatırası [Memory of Istanbul],’ the documentary he made with artist Altan Gürman on Marmara Island, and documents from his archive at Salt Research.
These materials are presented alongside works by Mehmet Güleryüz, Fatma Tülin and Sedat Pakay, artists whose professional trajectories intersected with Kabaş at various periods. Kabaş’s intellectual and artistic outlook was shaped at Robert College, now Boğaziçi University, where he studied engineering, and at the Yale School of Art, where he studied painting from 1957 to 1962; this combination gave him a perspective combining structural analysis with freedom of expression.
Although Kabaş is generally situated within the figurative tendencies of Turkey’s art scene, he maintained a critical distance from approaches that positioned figuration in opposition to abstraction. For Kabaş, what mattered was not the chosen style but the artist’s ability to develop a unique language rooted in geographical context and lived experience.
Kabaş taught at Robert College from 1964 to 1974, where he also served as director of Social Hall and advisor to the Robert College Cinema Club, helping develop the campus’s cultural environment. In 1971, he began teaching part-time at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, later Mimar Sinan University, joined the core faculty of its Basic Design Education Chair, and introduced into the curriculum the Bauhaus methodology he had learned from Josef Albers at Yale.
