The Gümüşsuyu home of the painter Ercüment Kalmık was turned into a museum in 1997 by his wife, Ayşe Kalmık. Kalmık, born in İstanbul in 1908 and died there in 1971, was a painter, art historian and teacher of the republican period, best known for his lyrical abstract paintings. From 1942 until the end of his life he combined teaching with painting and exhibited regularly in Türkiye and abroad; his works are in the İstanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi, the Ankara Resim ve Heykel Müzesi and many private collections.
He entered the Güzel Sanatlar Akademisi in 1929, studying first under Nazmi Ziya and then İbrahim Çallı, and graduated in 1937. In 1939 he went to Paris to paint in Andre Lhote's studio and attend art history courses at the Sorbonne, returning when war broke out. He held his first exhibition in İstanbul in 1941, taught painting at several schools, among them İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi, and in 1967 and 1968 gave basic design courses in Berlin as a visiting professor. In 1960 he was among the founders of the Türkiye Çağdaş Ressamlar Cemiyeti, and İstanbul Teknik Üniversitesi published his two books on colour harmony and on texture in nature and art.
After the 1950s he turned trees, flowers, gulls and city landscapes into abstractions of patches and lines, drawing on motif and cubist experiments, and his interest in rural life brought village landscapes and abstracted figures of village girls into his work. In the 1960s colour and geometric layering came to dominate, and strong patches of colour with lyrical, expressionist outlines stand out in his paintings.
When to go
- Climate
- Across İstanbul as a whole, monthly mean temperatures run from 6.8 °C in January to 24.7 °C in August; the mean stays between 15 and 25 °C in May, June, July, August, September and October; rainfall is heaviest in December (99 mm) and lightest in July (22 mm). Long-term means for 1950-2025 from the Turkish State Meteorological Service (MGM).
