Callum Innes Tondos

A publication documenting acclaimed Scottish artist Callum Innes’s Tondos––round paintings that continue a long tradition in art history.

For over thirty years, celebrated painter Callum Innes (b. 1962, Scotland) has created his lushly painted and subtly nuanced abstractions in a rectilinear format. In 2022, he added a striking new element to his repertoire: the tondo. To do so required mastering an entirely new set of technical and aesthetic challenges, confronting a form with abundant, historical resonances. This striking volume, richly illustrated with carefully selected images of Innes’s Tondos, and installation views of key exhibitions, explores how Innes has challenged traditional perceptions of shape and form to create dynamic and immersive visual experiences. A pivotal essay by art historian Éric de Chassey traces the artist’s encounters with this form and its progenitors in the history of art, firmly cementing Innes’s breakthrough in the pantheon of significant works rendered in this distinctive formation.

Callum Innes was born in Edinburgh in 1962. He lives and works in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Oslo, Norway. He studied drawing and painting at Gray’s School of Art from 1980–84 and completed a post-graduate degree at Edinburgh College of Art in 1985. In 1992, Innes had major exhibitions at the ICA London, and the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh. In 1995, he was shortlisted for the Turner Prize and was awarded the NatWest Prize in 1998 and the Jerwood Prize for Painting in 2002. His critically acclaimed museum exhibition, From Memory, traveled throughout Europe and Australia from 2006–08. In 2012, Innes was commissioned by the Edinburgh Arts Festival to transform the Scottish capital’s Regent Bridge with a changing sequence of colored light, and in 2016, he was the subject of a major retrospective survey exhibition and accompanying monograph, I’ll Close My Eyes, at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, the Netherlands. In 2018, his first major solo exhibition in France, In Position, took place at Chateau la Coste in Provence, with an accompanying publication. Innes debuted his new series of Tondo paintings at Sean Kelly Gallery, New York, in 2022; this was followed by exhibitions of the Tondo series at Frith Street Gallery, London; Parra & Romero, Ibiza; Galerie Tschudi, Zurich; and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin in 2023. He will have exhibitions at Sean Kelly, Los Angeles, and Kode – Lysverket Museum, Bergen, Norway, in 2024.

Callum Innes is a celebrated abstract painter from Scotland. His exhibition From Memory traveled throughout Europe and Australia from 2006–08. His retrospective, I’ll Close My Eyes, was held at the De Pont Museum in Tilburg, Netherlands, in 2016. His Tondos debuted in 2022. Innes’s work is included in major public collections worldwide.

Éric de Chassey is Director of the French National Institute of Art History in Paris and professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the École normale supérieure in Lyon. He chairs the International Network of Research Institutes in Art History and the editorial board of the project "The Visual Arts in Europe: An Open History".

Jeffrey Grove is Director of Museums and Publications at Sean Kelly Gallery. He has held curatorial posts at the Cleveland Museum of Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Dallas Museum of Art. He is the editor of publications on Loló Soldevilla, Michaël Borremans, Jim Hodges, Lee Krasner, and Morris Louis, among others.