Demet Müftüoğlu-Eşeli has a habit of pulling the improbable into Istanbul. The founder of ISTANBUL'74 has hosted Kid Cudi and Jeff Koons, and now she brings Robert Montgomery, the Scottish artist who turns poems into light and light into architecture. The itinerary was pure jet-set chaos: a 5am pickup, a four-hour flight, then a Mercedes Sprinter with disco lights on the ceiling and 45 minutes to get show-ready.
Words by Vaughan Ollier
Robert Montgomery, Demet Müftüoğlu-Eşeli and Alphan Eşeli.
The Show
The opening drew the usual cross-section of artists, creatives and collectors, all of whom seemed to know each other. And then there was me, swept in by Demet’s team, all smiles.
Robert greeted me with a huge hug. “You made it.”
A glass of Prosecco appeared in my hand.
He walked us through four floors of a townhouse transformed into his world, with light works once shown at the Louvre hanging alongside some of his most acclaimed paintings.
Robert Montgomery at the opening of his show.
His words never stay on the page. They become color, structure and something you physically move through.
Robert grabs my hand and leads me to the first poem: a large installation crowned with a bright gold bell. It reads: “Flatten time and ring the bell so no-one ever dies.”
“If you ring this, your loved ones will never die,” he tells me.
I ring it twice.
Another poem brings heartbreak into his voice.
“The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive.”
He wrote it while holding a friend’s hand as they were about to pass away.
Another poem carries a heavier charge: The people you love become ghosts inside of you and like this you keep them alive. He wrote it holding a dying friend's hand.
From the Mines to the Louvre
Montgomery grew up in a former coal-mining village in Scotland, where both his grandfathers worked underground. Art school was his exit and his first taste of freedom. A visit from James Turrell changed everything, pushing his practice past paint toward the fusion of light and language that has since lit up the Louvre and the streets of London.
Love is the revolutionary Energy, Robert Montgomery, Jardin des Tuileries, Paris Art Basel 2022.
Baldwin's Balcony
The exhibition takes its name from James Baldwin's Balcony in Istanbul, 2026. Baldwin lived in the city on and off from 1961 to 1971, and Montgomery gives him the company he imagined for him: the poet Edip Cansever, Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Yevgeny Yevtushenko, gathered on a balcony overlooking the water, with Baldwin smiling at the center.
James Baldwin's Balcony in Istanbul, 2026
The New York companion piece, Study for the Party Where James Baldwin Teaches Bob Dylan the Lemon on a Fork Trick, 2025, seats Baldwin and Dylan beside Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell and John Ashbery, their faces glowing against an emotional wash of purple and blue. Slightly surreal, entirely believable. Stare long enough and you are at the party too.
Study for the Party Where James Baldwin Teaches Bob Dylan the Lemon on a Fork Trick, 2025
The Light Poems
Everything in the City, 2026, was made specifically for Istanbul. Demet frames Montgomery's bond with the city through the coexistence of its religious, secular and social worlds, and that is precisely his gift: he takes something that already exists, a city, a memory, a person, and illuminates it until you see it anew. LOVE IS THE REVOLUTIONARY ENERGY, another Louvre veteran, feels even more electric woven into Istanbul's architecture.
Everything in the City, 2026
Robert and Demet
The partnership between Montgomery and ISTANBUL'74 stretches back more than a decade, and this show reads as both culmination and new chapter. ISTANBUL'74 has also carried his poems onto handcrafted leather pieces through a collaboration with Turkish luxury house Misela. Demet works the crowd the way she builds an artist's world, connecting friends of friends until everyone is in the same conversation.
Robert Montgomery & Demet Müftüoğlu-Eşeli.
After Hours
Outside, a fabulous man named Tolga summed up the evening in four words: "This is Istanbul, darling." For me, the party had the energy of the New York '80s scene I've only read about, a little chaotic, very glamorous, entirely unbothered by hierarchy. The night moved on to a bar with music pumping and drinks flowing, where Montgomery talked life, inspiration and his Scottish roots with the gallery team, expats and Demet herself, while the sea glittered under the city lights. For one night, Istanbul felt like every golden era I've ever wished I'd lived through.
Montgomery's parting thought is the simplest one:
"Do not let them forget the love."
Images courtesy of artist and Istanbul 74
