Abstract art in Britain, in its widest sense, is currently enjoying a revival of interest among collectors, art dealers and curators; a time span which runs from the 1960s to the latest recipient of the Turner Prize, Tomma Abts. Callum Innes, still only in his mid-forties, is Scotland’s premier abstract painter. He is represented in leading public collections and by commercial galleries in London, New York and Dublin; he was awarded the Jerwood Painting Prize 2002 and showed at Tate, St Ives in 2005. The current show, organised by the dynamic Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, features a selection of small and large-scale paintings created over the past 15 years. They are imbued with a sense of art history: think of Malevich’s ground-breaking Supremacist black and white paintings, Rothko, and American Hard-Edge Abstraction and Field Painting in general.
The earliest work in the exhibition, from 1989, is the black oil-painted form of a wild cucumber ‘sunken’ into corrugated cardboard, which gives the show its title.
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