Callum Innes

Callum Innes makes work in a number of different ways, all of which are gradually evolving. The shifts that appear from one series to the next are rarely dramatic, but each new painting builds on those that have gone before in a subtle but constant progression. Over the past few years it is the series described as Exposed Paintings that have become best known, but there are other types too that share the central contradiction of all his work: that something so apparently simple can have such a complex effect on the mind and eye. Like the Exposed Paintings – made by layering pigments onto the canvas and then removing the oil paint with washes of turpentine – paintings such as his Agitated Verticals, Resonance, Isolated Forms and Monologue works are made by this process of un-painting as well as painting, so that the potential for uncertainty is ever present.

Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh in 1962 and studied at Grays School of Art, Aberdeen and Edinburgh College of Art. Innes was short-listed for the Turner and Jerwood Prizes in 1995, won the prestigious NatWest Prize for Painting in 1998, and in 2002 was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting. He has exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and his work is held in public collections worldwide including the Guggenheim, New York; National Gallery of Australia; TATE, London, and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.

From Memory, a major exhibition of Callum Innes’ work over the past 15 years, was shown at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh in 2006, and toured to Modern Art Oxford, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney in 2007.

Innes had a substantial solo exhibition of new work at Ingleby Gallery for the Edinburgh Art Festival in August 2009 and Ingleby Gallery held a major exhibition Callum Innes: Works on Paper 1989-2012 earlier this year.

In August 2012, commissioned by the Edinburgh Art Festival, Innes realised his first ever public art project, transforming the capital’s neglected Regent Bridge by illuminating the historic arch with changing sequences of coloured light.