Callum Innes – Untitled

September 13, 2014 – October 11, 2014 

 

We are proud to present for the second time new works by Callum Innes at Loock Galerie.

Innes’ exhibition focuses on a series of new paintings from the series “Exposed Paintings" and new watercolors that were created this year.

Callum Innes’ 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 filling the surface of the image with paint, then washing sections clean.

Vertical and horizontal lines, abstraction and "washing out" previously applied paints are all characteristic for Innes. Washing out gives him the possibility of preserving a human presence and the play with light in the painting without representing them with a figure. He describes the link between figuration and abstraction thus: “You look at the horizontal and you’ve got landscape. You look at the vertical and you’ve got figuration ... 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 ist physicality, how a painting reacts to you, what you bring to it.“ 

In his watercolors, Innes is also concerned with the emotional aspect of color. Watercolors for him, like for William Turner at the beginning of the nineteenth century, are a kind of research project about developing the pictorial construction and the representation of light through water and pigments in varying ratios.

 

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 had been 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.

 

From October 2013 to March 2014, he showed new works as part of the presentation of the collection at Neues Museum Nürnberg, entitled "Malerei als Prozess", he is part of the exhibition "Generation" at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, on show until November 2.