Callum Innes – I Look to You

Over the past 20 years, Edinburgh born Callum Innes has emerged as one of the leading abstract painters of his generation, making work which stands defiantly against the tide of the quick fix that has dominated the sensibility of so many of his contemporaries. Innes was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1995, won the prestigious NatWest Prize for Painting in 1998, and in 2002 was awarded the Jerwood Prize for Painting.
Most of his paintings are made by “un-painting” as well as painting: A language that he has made his own; oil paint is applied in layers and dissolved away with turpentine, forming something quietly and unexpectedly beautiful.
His exhibition for the Edinburgh Art Festival will include the first showing of a body of new paintings which take a very simple form; a painting in two halves, divided vertically down the centre of the canvas, with layers of coloured pigments coated over black and dissolved away to leave only a trace of colour. They are amongst his most elemental and powerful paintings to date.
A publication for the exhibition (£25 rrp, £20 from the gallery during the run of the exhibition) celebrating the new paintings includes an essay by Emilie Gordenker, director of Maurithuis, the Dutch Royal Collection, examining Innes’s unexpected relationship with Vermeer.