Callum Innes: Where to Start
Callum Innes Untitled Lamp Black / Magenta, 2024 Oil on linen 47 1/4 x 46 7/16 inches
Berggruen Gallery is pleased to present Callum Innes: Where To Start, an exhibition of new works by Scottish painter Callum Innes. This show marks Callum Innes’ first solo exhibition with the gallery. The show opened on November 15, 2024, and will be on view through January 9, 2025. The gallery hosted a reception for the artist on Friday, November 15, from 4:00 to 7:00 p.m.
Callum Innes Untitled Lamp Black / Titanium White, 2024 Oil on Linen 32 1/4 x 31 1/2 inches
Where To Start exhibits a series of major works by Callum Innes grappling with themes of time, space, and fragility. Featuring work from his acclaimed Exposed Painting series, Innes' alchemical color process of layering paint and dissolving it with turpentine, reveals unpredictable and often unreplicable colors onto canvas and wood. What appear to be works of monochrome and precision, contain buried veils of pigmentation - traces of color emerge, change, and are obscured under layers of painting and repainting. Marks of color twist over the sides of each work mirroring the way paint spills onto the floors and studio walls during Innes’ process. The works expand into the spaces around them both in process and upon completion. Likened to the shutter of a camera, Innes’ works of abstraction freeze a moment of time, the fateful moment when the process concludes, and the painting stops.
From Left to Right: Callum Innes, Exposed Painting Bluish Violet Red Oxide, 2019 Oil on Linen 77 x 75 inches, Untitled Lamp Black / Caribbean Turquoise, 2024 Oil on Linen 40 3/16 x 39 3/8 inches, Untitled Lamp Black / Alizarin Claret, 2024 Oil on Birch Ply 47 1/4 inches in diameter
Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh and currently works between Edinburgh and Oslo. Innes studied Painting and Drawing at Gray’s School of Art in Aberdeen, and did a postgraduate degree at Edinburgh College of Art. In the mid to late 1980s and early 1990s, Innes began exhibiting in major public galleries such as the ICA, London, and The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Beginning his career as a figurative painter, Innes transitioned to abstract painting after an experiment sinking an image into corrugated cardboard led to a desire to create work in which material and image became one. He was the recipient of The Natwest Prize for Painting (1998), and The Jerwood Prize for Painting (2002), and was shortlisted for The Turner Prize. He has shown internationally in galleries and museums around the world including at the Guggenheim, New York; Center Pompidou, Paris; the Kunstmuseum, Bern, Switzerland; Kode Bergen Art Museum, Norway; Fort Worth Museum, Texas; TATE, London; The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Innes was the subject of a major one-person survey exhibition and monograph in 2016 called I'll Close My Eyes, at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg Netherlands.
About Berggruen Gallery
Berggren Gallery, established in 1970, has been a member of the Art Dealers Association of America since 1975. The gallery specializes in the exhibition and sale of contemporary art and 20th-century American and European paintings, drawings, sculpture, and limited edition prints. Berggruen Gallery exhibits the works of major American post-war artists as well as established and emerging contemporary artists, such as Diana Al-Hadid, Heather Day, Peter Halley, Jane Hammond, Barry McGee, Joan Mitchell, Georgia O’Keeffe, Richard Serra, Joel Shapiro, and Stanley Whitney.
Callum Innes: Where To Start, November 15, 2024 – January 9, 2025. On view at 10 Hawthorne Street, San Francisco, CA 94105. Images and previews are available upon request. For more information about exhibitions and fairs featuring artists from Berggruen Gallery, please visit their site here. The Gallery can also be found on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
