Callum Innes

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Callum Innes (born 1962) is a Scottish abstract painter and former Turner Prize nominee.

[edit] Life and work

Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh. He attended the Gray's School of Art (1980–84) and graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1985.

Innes began exhibiting in the mid-to-late 1980's and in 1992 had two major exhibitions in public galleries, at the ICA, London, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Since then he has had numerous solo shows throughout Britain, Europe and North America, and more recently in New Zealand. A substantial selection of his best-known series, the "Exposed" paintings, was exhibited in 1998 at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England, and at the Kunsthalle Bern the following year. He has participated in many group shows including The British Art Show 3 (1990), Wonderful Life, Lisson Gallery, London (1993), From Here, Karsten Schubert Gallery and Waddington Galleries (1994), Abstractions Provisoires, Musee d'Art Moderne de St Etienne (1997), the touring exhibition About Vision - New British Paintings in the 1990's (1996-7) and Abstract Painting Once Removed at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.

In 1995 he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize which was won by Damien Hirst. In 1998 Innes won the NatWest Art Prize and in 1992 he won The Jerwood Painting Prize and the Artisti Invitati Al Premio Internazionale.

His work is represented in numerous collections, both private and public including The Irish Museum of Modern Art, The Tate London, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra and Deutsche Bank.

He regularly exhibits internationally and lives in Glasgow.

[edit] Working process

Innes is a painter who has tended to work alternately on a number of disparate series, each of which he repeatedly revisits. His characteristic form of coolly atmospheric abstraction has aptly been described as "unpainting", given that key compositional elements are generally produced, not by the application of paint, but through its removal by washes of turpentine. Each finished painting thus suggests a freezing in time of the otherwise momentary arrest of an ongoing process.