Callum Innes was born in 1962 in Edinburgh, UK.

He lives and works in Edinburgh, United Kingdom and in Olso, Norway. 

The interplay between the additive and subtractive process, the making and unmaking, presence and absence, constitutes the essence of the oeuvre developed by Callum Innes.

He began exhibiting in the mid-to-late 1980's and in 1992 had two major exhibitions in public galleries, at the ICA, London and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. Since then, he has emerged as one of the most significant abstract painters of his generation, achieving widespread recognition through major solo and group shows worldwide. Innes was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1995. He won the NatWest Prize for Painting in 1998 and the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002 and his work is included in scores of prestigious public collections, including Tate in London, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Kunsthaus Zürich, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra. 

Innes makes work in several different ways, all of which are gradually evolving. The shifts that appear from one series to the next are rarely dramatic, but each new painting builds on those that have gone before in a subtle but constant progression. His characteristic form of coolly atmospheric abstraction has aptly been described as 'unpainting', given that key compositional elements are generally produced, not by the application of paint, but through its removal by washes of turpentine. Each finished painting thus suggests a freezing in time of the otherwise momentary arrest of an ongoing process.

Innes has likened this halting of time to the photographic process, stating: ‘With my work in abstraction, I think about it 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.’