Callum Innes

The interplay between the additive and subtractive process, making and unmaking, presence and absence, constitutes the essence of the oeuvre developed by Callum Innes.

Born in Edinburgh in 1962, he studied drawing and painting at Gray's School of Art from 1980 to 1984 and then completed a postgraduate degree at Edinburgh College of Art, in 1985.

He 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 emerged as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation, achieving widespread recognition through major solo and group shows worldwide.

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.

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.

* Biography courtesy of the artist