Callum Innes – Untitled

October 30 – December 19, 2010

 

Loock Galerie is pleased to present new works by Scottish painter Callum Innes.

Innes’ exhibition focuses on a series of white paintings that were created in 2010. A work from the series Monologue Paintings from 2007 complements the show. 

Callum Innes’ clearly abstract paintings reveal a transcendental physicality that reflects his interest in the fragility of human existence. His process of painting includes this notion of becoming and passing by fillig the surface of the image with paint, then washing sections clean.

The vertical line which is especially characteristic of his work represents in its completeness a possibility for capturing this human presence in the image without having it embodied by a figure. The figurative painting with which he began his work remained part of his thinking. “I still see myself as being an inherently figurative artist, whether that figuration is to do with how I approach the making of a painting or its physicality, how a painting reacts to you, what you bring to it". 

Callum Innes’ painting is defined by the moment. In an interview, he draws a comparison to photography. Just as the photograph with the gaze through the viewfinder enters the visual space of the camera and controls the image until the moment of shooting the picture by way of the shutter, the exposure time, and focus, his painting is marked by the moment that allows the image to be recognizable as complete: “The important thing in finishing a painting is to know when to step out of that space", he says.

 

Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh in 1962, where he lives and works today. He was the recipient of the Jerwood Prize for Painting and was already nominated for the Turner Prize. His works have been shown in individual shows at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery, Kunsthalle Bern, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. His works are included in public collections around the world, including  Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, British Arts Council, Centre Georges Pompidou, Kunsthalle Zürich, and London’s Tate Gallery.