Salt Beyoğlu in Istanbul presents Across the Seas: Özer Kabaş and His Times from 16 September 2026 to 14 March 2027. The exhibition follows the artist, teacher and writer Özer Kabaş (1934 to 1998) through four decades of work, from the 1960s to the 1990s. Across the second and third floors it gathers his paintings and original prints, jewellery made at the Urart Art Studio, two films and papers from his archive at Salt Research. Mehmet Güleryüz, Fatma Tülin and Sedat Pakay, whose careers met his at different moments, are represented by works of their own.

Kabaş was born in Mersin in 1934. He took a degree in mechanical engineering at Robert College in Istanbul. He then spent 1957 to 1962 at the Yale School of Art training as a painter, with Josef Albers among his teachers. From 1964 to 1974 he taught at Robert College, ran its Social Hall as an exhibition space and advised the college cinema club. In 1971 the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts also took him on to teach Basic Design, and he brought the Bauhaus teaching of Albers into its studios. He was made a professor in 1990, by which time the Academy had become Mimar Sinan University.

From the 1970s the sea became the centre of his painting. Fishermen, sailors and dock workers fill the canvases, hauling ropes, sorting nets and steering boats while the water closes around them. Kabaş set aside linear perspective and stacked his images in layers, drawing on Homer, Anatolian legend and his own voyages around the islands of the Sea of Marmara. In his writings he called his ideas "montage", "synthesis" and "horizontal and vertical effects", terms he used to weigh local visual culture against the wider art world.

İstanbul Hatırası [Memory of Istanbul], a 16mm film of 1967, won first prize at the first Hisar Short Film Competition that year. It is screened together with the documentary Kabaş shot with the artist Altan Gürman on Marmara Island. The jewellery comes from Urart, the studio he set up in 1971 with his brothers Mehmet and Vedat Kabaş. Salt opened his archive to researchers in 2023, and the exhibition, programmed by Tuğçe Kaplan and Vasıf Kortun, draws on it alongside loans from Yula Kabaş.