Callum Innes (Scottish, b.1962) is an abstract painter born in Edinburgh, whose work is defined by an exploration of color and materiality of paint on the canvas. He studied drawing and painting at Gray’s School of Art from 1980 to 1984, and then completed a post-graduate degree at Edinburgh College of Art, in 1985. Innes works on multiple series at once, leaving pure color on one canvas while applying and removing color from another. The method of addition and subtraction in his Exposed Paintings (c.1998) reveals gradients of a single color applied to the canvas. He achieves this by repeatedly brushing turpentine on the paint before it dries, leaving mere traces of the original color. A finished work captures an otherwise temporary pause in a continual process of painting and “unpainting,” as Innes has called it.
He was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002, and the Nat West Prize in 1998. In 1995, Innes was short-listed for the Turner Prize. His critically-acclaimed museum exhibition, From Memory (2006), traveled throughout Europe and Australia.
His work is represented in numerous private and public collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Centre George Pompidou, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Tate London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, the Kunstmuseum, Bern, the Museum of Modern Art, Ft. Worth, TX, and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo.
