Callum Innes

One of the most respected painters working today, Callum Innes’s practice interrogates the qualities and possibilities of oil paint. He is known for luminous abstractions which expose the fundamentals of painting: pigment, surface and space. Moving between the solid and the seemingly permeable, his works invoke a dynamic conversation between presence and absence. Through this uniquely spare vocabulary, Innes achieves a vast range of atmospheres and effects.

Innes works in series, allowing processes to build upon each other and gradually evolve. He makes several kinds of painting at the same time, each discreetly different yet informing and reflecting upon the others. The Exposed Paintings and the Untitled series exemplify his technique of creating a play between addition and removal. In these works, successive layers of oil paint are applied to the canvas, which is then entirely covered in black. This in turn, is removed by repeated washes of turpentine dissolving paint from part of the surface, here leaving all but the faintest veil of slightly striated pigment. The remaining black part of the canvas is then painted with another colour, resulting in a luminous, shifting surface that evokes different registers of colour, surface and even time.