Özer Kabaş in his room at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, c.1970s
Image: Salt Research, Özer Kabaş Archive
Across the Seas: Özer Kabaş and His Times is now on view at Salt Beyoğlu. The exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of the work of artist, educator and writer Özer Kabaş from the 1960s to the 1990s.
Salt’s new exhibition Across the Seas: Özer Kabaş and His Times examines the practice – ranging from painting and design to film and theatre – of artist, educator and writer Özer Kabaş (1934–1998) and his place in Turkey’s cultural history.
Kabaş’s intellectual and artistic outlook was shaped at Robert College (Boğaziçi University), where he studied engineering, and at the Yale School of Art, where he studied painting from 1957 to 1962. This gave him a unique perspective combining structural analysis with freedom of expression.
While Kabaş is generally situated within the figurative tendencies in Turkey’s art scene, he maintained a critical distance from the polarising approaches that positioned figuration in opposition to abstraction. In his view, what mattered was not the chosen style, but the artist’s ability to develop a unique language rooted in geographical context and lived experience. Through concepts he developed in his writings such as ‘montage’, ‘synthesis’ and ‘horizontal and vertical effects’, Kabaş explored the relationship between local visual culture and the global art scene. He rejected both the idea of tradition as something fixed and the uncritical adoption of Western art as a model. For him, art was shaped by the constant interaction of culture, history, geography and everyday life. Alongside his painting and teaching, his short films, texts and jewellery designs at the Urart Art Studio, which he co-founded, were part of the same intellectual quest.
Salt Beyoğlu
İstiklal Cad. 136
Beyoğlu 34430
Istanbul
Tel: +90 212 377 42 00
Özer Kabaş in his room at the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts, c.1970s
Image: Salt Research, Özer Kabaş Archive
