CALLUM INNES
(Scottish, born 1962)
Exposed Painting Ivory Black, Yellow Oxide, 2000
Oil on canvas
83 5/8 x 81 11/16" (212.40 x 207.48 cm.)
Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery
Gerald S. Elliott Fund, 2001

Scottish artist, Callum Innes, creates his work through a process of elimination. His elegantly minimal abstractions are the result of using turpentine to wash away areas of thickly applied paint. Painted sections abut areas that have been erased, and the faint traces of fluid turpentine between them provide the only active areas in his work. Motivated by a desire to reinvigorate abstraction in the twenty-first century, Innes’s primary subject is the act of painting itself.

Callum Innes was born in 1962 in Edinburgh, Scotland where he lives and works today. From 1980 to 1985, he attended Grays School of Art, Aberdeen, and the Edinburgh College of Art. His early work was characterized by a freely painted figuration like much of the expressionist art being made throughout Europe in the 1980s. Since 1988, Innes has devoted himself to non-objective abstraction, creating work that revives and renews the traditions of abstract painting from Kasimir Malevich to Mark Rothko and Robert Ryman. In the mid-1990s these efforts resulted in a series of works Innes called "Exposed," of which the Gallery’s painting is an example. In these paintings, bands of thickly applied pigment are contrasted with thin, liquid stains in areas where the pigment has been washed away. Presence and absence, material and immaterial, painted and erased – these opposites engage in a dialogue within his work. As Innes explains it: "…. the idea of the exposed painting was significant; something painted, something dissolved and removed, a trace left behind, you could say a sense of loss, and a sense of loss with little clues around about, a sense of evidence of something having been there."

— Jennifer Bayles

Copyright © 2003 The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy