Callum Innes: New Paintings and Watercolours
Over the past 20 years Callum Innes has developed one of the most notable practices in contemporary painting. His spare yet complex works investigate and explore the possibilities of this most testing of mediums.
Innes tends to work alternately on a number of disparate series, each of which he repeatedly revisits. The works in his Untitled series appear at first to be one single colour. These paintings are in fact composed of layers of colour; in the first instance the entire canvas is painted black – turpentine is then repeatedly applied by brush to remove paint from part of the surface. Innes washes away or as he has described it, 'unpaints', leaving all but the faintest vestigial traces of pigment. The remaining black part of the canvas is then over painted with another colour. The result is rich and luminous. A play between the additive and subtractive process, making and unmaking and the sheer enjoyment of paint underlies this very sophisticated body of work.
