An exhibition of paintings by the highly regarded Scottish painter Callum Innes opens to the public at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Wednesday 23 June. Innes, the winner of the prestigious NatWest Art Prize in 1998, will show a specially selected body of new and recent works, including paintings from his Exposed and Resonance series alongside a number of watercolours. The exhibition is part of an ongoing strand of programming at the Museum which aims to bring important new international art to Ireland, as well as responding to new developments in art in Ireland.
Callum Innes is internationally recognised as having made a significant contribution to the field of contemporary abstract painting. He claims a desire to reconnect with an audience that he sees as alienated by the theoretical debates that have surrounded painting in the latter half of the 20th century. Working largely in monochrome, his process is one of subtraction – applying and then removing paint from the surface of the canvas to produce works with an enigmatic, meditative quality.
Writer Marco Livingstone has described Innes’ work as “unusually quiet by contemporary standards, in need of an intimate, one-to-one examination by the viewer …. Photographs of his paintings convey almost nothing of their subtleties of surface and technique the fine tuning of their colour and material substance or their luscious sensuousness.” On his own estimate, he destroys as much as three-quarters of his output, the price of his own exacting standards. An almost imperceptible flaw in one section of a canvas can, for him, ruin a painting whose surface is otherwise immaculately achieved. The works in the exhibition have been selected for the ground floor rooms of the museum – a perfect setting for that ‘intimate examination by the viewer’.
Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh in 1961, where he continues to live and work. In addition to the £26,000 NatWest Art Prize in 1998, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and the Jerwood Prize in 1995. He has exhibited widely internationally, throughout Europe and in America. In 1998 alone he had solo exhibitions in London, Zurich, Paris and New York and most recently at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, and Kunsthalle Berne, Switzerland.
Callum Innes continues at IMMA until 12 September 1999.
There will be an illustrated catalogue to accompany the exhibition including essays by Marco Livingstone and Bernard Fibicher.
Admission is free.
Opening hours: Tue – Sat 10.00am – 5.30pm
Sun & Bank Holidays 12 noon – 5.30pm
For further information or colour images please contact Philomena Byrne or Rowena
Neville at Tel : +353 1 612 9900, Fax : +353 1 612 9999
2 June 1999