In 2018 Innes was one of two Edinburgh Printmakers' Artist Patrons who donated limited edition prints to our Capital Fundraising campaign, to support the restoration of our new home in Castle Mill Works. This print was one of the donated works produced specially for this campaign.

Callum Innes has had a long-standing relationship with Edinburgh Printmakers and began to exploring lithography in 2011. He enjoyed playing with layers of colour and experimenting with ways to remove ink from the stone, in keeping with how he works with oil paint on canvas.

BIOGRAPHY

Callum Innes is the leading minimalist artist living and working in Scotland. His practice spans printmaking and painting. He first exhibited in the mid-to-late 1980’s, emerging as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation.

Callum Innes is an artist Patron of Edinburgh Printmakers. He works in long-standing collaboration with Edinburgh Printmakers, publishing commissioned editions for national and international exhibitions. In 2004 he worked extensively with Senior Etching Technician Alfons Bytautas to produce suites of monochrome of photopolymer gravure prints. He began to explore lithography in 2011 and has since worked on multiple series of lithographs with Alastair Clark, Studio Director. A major retrospective of his work in print, Prints 2005 – 2019, was an inaugural exhibition at Castle Mills in 2019.

Innes' process is multifaceted but always deploys a gradual evolution of images. Shifts that appear from one series to the next are rarely dramatic. Each painting builds on those that have gone before in constant progression. He describes his characteristic form of coolly atmospheric abstraction as “unpainting”. This term describes the creation of key elements of the work through washes of turpentine, not through application of paint. Each painting suggests a freezing in time, capturing a moment within ongoing processes. Innes has likened this halting of time to the photographic process, stating:

“ I think about [my process of abstraction] as photography, as photography freezes moments in time, so I work with time more than anything else… There is a moment in time and space when a painting stops in much the same way that a camera’s shutter closes on a moment in time. This is not a static thing.”

Innes was shortlisted for the Turner and Jerwood Prizes in 1995. He won the prestigious NatWest Prize for Painting in 1998, and the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002. Collections including his work include the Guggenheim, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fort Worth Museum, Texas; TATE, London, and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.