Callum Innes

(Scottish, born 1962)

Callum Innes is a Scottish painter best known for his use of monochromatic colors and clean bilateral divisions of the picture plane in both watercolor and oil. Steeped in the formal language Barnett Newman, Innes explores the metaphorical nature of revision and subtraction in painting, scrubbing off layers of partially dried paint with turpentine to excavate the gradient of pigments below. “Painting is long-term. I make a great deal of work, and I edit a great deal of work out,” he has explained. “A lot of work is not back to the drawing board but into the dustbin. I always see the possibility of going for the next step, changing something like the pigment or the color, or the structure of the piece.” Born in 1962 in Edinburgh, United Kingdom, he studied first at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen before finishing his degree at the Edinburgh College of Art. He was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1995 and awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002. Innes’s museum exhibition, “From Memory” (2006), traveled throughout Europe and Australia. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, among others. He continues to live and work in Edinburgh, United Kingdom.