Adam's Mid-Century Modern July 28th 2020

24 Tuesday 28 th July 2020 There aren’t that many painters working today whose work can plausibly bear comparison with that of some of the acknowledged greats of the recent past, but Callum Innes is certainly one of them. The consistent discipline, rigour and concentration of his painting since he arrived on the scene in the late 1980s set him apart from the bulk of his contemporaries. Indifferent to momentary fashion, he has from early on played a long game. And what he has achieved merits comparison with such artists as Mark Rothko or Bridget Riley. He shares with them a rewarding fascination with working within a limited set of parameters. He was born in Edinburgh and, after attending Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen he returned to Edinburgh for post-graduate studies. It is characteristic of his temperament that, rather than following the siren call of London in the era of the Young British Artists, he has remained living and working in Edinburgh. When he embarked on painting fulltime having completed his studies, he was making figurative work but was dissatisfied with it. In fact, his breakthrough came when he removed himself from Edinburgh, to take up a residency in Amsterdam. The changed environment prompted him to find a new approach. Rather than looking to an image to convey presence, he turned his attention to the materials and processes of painting themselves. Pain is a physical medium and he is certainly not the first artist to use its physicality in this way. But where- as the tendency was to use the rich flesh-like substance of oil pigment to embody the figure, usually with substantial impasto, Innes took the opposite direction. He emphasized absence. Having built up a concrete mass of colour he progressively dissolved areas of the paint surface with the application of washes of turpentine. The various layers invested in the surface are unraveled like the constituent threads of a complex tapestry weaving. A spare process, one dependent on luck and judgment, with a high rate of rejection, proved to be exceptionally elo- quent in expressing the facts of present and absence, with the countless nuances those states entail (time, memory, transience and loss for example). Untitled No 76, with its bisected, everything-and-nothing space, its elegant simplicity, is a classical Innes. He has exhibited extensively in Ireland (he is represented by the Kerlin Gallery), the UK, Europe and the United States and his work is in numerous collections. It 1998 he won the Nat West Art Prize and in 2002 the Jerwood Painting Prize. Aiden Dunne, June 2020 19 CALLUM INNES (B.1962) UNTITLED NO.76 (2010) Oil on linen, 62 x 60cm Provenance: With the Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, where purchased. € 15,000 - 20,000