
Kerlin Gallery is delighted to present St Sebastian, an exhibition of new painting by Callum Innes.
Through the ages, painting has endured with a remarkable potential to affect us. Its physicality can overwhelm us. We can experience it with a visceral and emotive response. Or it can whisper and pull us into unknown depths of subtle complexity. It is bodily and sensual while asking us to think, often in the most profound ways.
Over the past 35 years, Callum Innes has developed a completely individual approach to painting that explores all these myriad possibilities. By repeatedly applying and dissolving layers of paint, rich in texture and colour Innes exposes the fundamentals of paint itself. Full of humanity and fallibility, his art strives for a balance between precision and imperfection, opacity and luminosity, contemplation and material presence.
Over the past two years, Innes has continued to develop and refine his oeuvre by introducing colours of heightened intensity and depth and by advancing a new series of circular or ‘Tondo’ paintings. The paintings in St Sebastian are the result of this intense period of work, paintings that resonate with the history of art and redefine its contemporary potential.
Callum Innes creates abstract paintings that carry a powerful tension between control and fluidity. Dissolution is central to his practice: layers of deep pigments are brushed over with turpentine, breaking down sections of paint and leaving watery, trace elements, before being painted over again. Repeating this process of painting, dissolving and repainting multiple times, Innes builds depth and a sense of history: oblique panels of dense pigments become embedded and fortified, while tiny trickles or rivulets of liquified paint point to their underlying fragility. This meticulous approach to materials is carried across into the artists’ watercolours and pastels, in which pigment is built up into velveteen layers. Though Innes’s works may seem minimal or geometric at first glance, they are in fact always slightly “off kilter”, governed by imperfectly drawn lines and slightly softened shapes. This fallibility and humanity, put in contrast with the artist’s skill and precision as a painter, results in works of great poetic and contemplative power – cementing Innes’s place as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation.
Kerlin Gallery was founded in Dublin in 1988. It has built an international reputation for its dedicated, meaningful representation of leading contemporary artists through its exhibition, publishing and art fair programmes. Its current site was designed by the minimalist architect John Pawson in 1994 and offers 3,600 square feet of exhibition space over two floors in the heart of Dublin City Centre.

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