Frith Street Gallery

Callum Innes

23 March 1990 – 27 April 1990

Related Artists: Callum Innes

Callum Innes, born in 1962, is a young Scottish painter currently living in Edinburgh. Innes finished his training at the Edinburgh College of Art in 1985, and has since been included in exhibitions throughout Scotland – including ‘Scatter’ at the Third Eye Centre, Glasgow in 1989. He has been chosen for inclusion, from over 1000 artists, for the prestigious ‘British Art Show’ – the Arts Council exhibition which has, since its conception, consistently found and presented major new talent.

Innes has been making a name for work that is not in the style we have primarily come to expect from recent Scottish art – large scale figurative painting. Rather, Innes’ works are muted, gentle abstractions of natural phenomena. Painted on wax paper or corrugated cardboard, they tend to contain a simple image – (a core of brush strokes and paint drips) – on a plain, coloured ground.

The action of painting is evident in these works, and conceptually important. Innes attempts to embody and reflect the arbitrary and enduring mechanisms of natural phenomena – (decay, memory, growth) – by approximating their processes in paint. Turpentine is dripped to let paint run where it will, so that the resulting image appears as a strong, luminous core with a frail, random edge.

The paintings have a natural elegance closer to conceptual work than abstraction, so that intellect and intuition are powerfully combined. They choose a middle ground between the spare beauty of a minimal aesthetic and the gestural panache of abstraction.

The exhibition at the Frith Street Gallery will be Callum Innes’ first major exhibition in London.