Callum Innes: Where To Start

Where To Start exhibits a series of major works by Callum Innes grappling with themes of time, space, and fragility. Featuring work from his acclaimed Exposed Painting series, Innes' alchemical color process of layering paint and dissolving it with turpentine, reveals unpredictable and often unreplicable colors onto canvas and wood. What appear to be works of monochrome and precision, contain buried veils of pigmentation - traces of color emerge, change, and are obscured under layers of painting and repainting. Marks of color twist over the sides of each work mirroring the way paint spills onto the floors and studio walls during Innes’ process. The works expand into the spaces around them both in process and upon completion. Likened to the shutter of a camera, Innes’ works of abstraction freeze a moment of time, the fateful moment when the process concludes, and the painting stops. 

Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh and currently works between Edinburgh and Oslo. Innes studied Painting and Drawing at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, and did a postgraduate degree at Edinburgh College of Art. In the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s, Innes began exhibiting in major public galleries such as the ICA, London, and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Beginning his career as a figurative painter, Innes transitioned to abstract painting after an experiment sinking an image into cardboard led to a desire to create work in which material and image became one. He was the recipient of The Natwest Prize for Painting (1998), and The Jerwood Prize for Painting (2002), and was shortlisted for The Turner Prize. He has shown internationally in galleries and museums around the world including at the Guggenheim, New York; Center Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; Kode Bergen Art Museum, Norway; Fort Worth Museum, Texas; TATE, London; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Innes was the subject of a major one-person survey exhibition and monograph in 2016 called I'll Close My Eyes, at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg Netherlands.