#calluminnes

Callum Innes creates abstract paintings that carry a powerful tension between control and fluidity. Dissolution is central to his practice: layers of deep pigments are brushed over with turpentine, breaking down sections of paint and leaving watery, trace elements, before being painted over again. Repeating this process of painting, dissolving and repainting multiple times, Innes builds depth and a sense of history: oblique panels of dense pigments become embedded and fortified, while tiny trickles or rivulets of liquified paint point to their underlying fragility. 

This meticulous approach to materials is carried across into the artists’ watercolours and pastels, in which pigment is built up into velveteen layers. Though Innes’s works may seem minimal or geometric at first glance, they are in fact always slightly “off kilter”, governed by imperfectly drawn lines and slightly softened shapes. This fallibility and humanity, put in contrast with the artist’s skill and precision as a painter, results in works of great poetic and contemplative power – cementing Innes’s place as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation.

‘With my work in abstraction, I think about it as photography, as photography freezes moments in time, so I work with time more than anything else … There is a moment in time and space when painting stops in much the same way that a camera’s shutter closes on a moment in time. This is not a static thing’ – Callum Innes

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1. Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Cobalt Blue, 2008, Phillips

2. Callum Innes, Untitled, 2019, Frith Street Gallery

3. Callum Innes’s Exhibition at Kerlin Gallery, 2017

4. Work in progress, artist’s studio

5. The artist Callum Innes, Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, 2018