Object-Images: The Exposed Paintings of Callum Innes and the Phenomenology of Non Representational Painting

This thesis seeks to explore the notion of non-representation in painting and consider our

experience of such paintings in phenomenological terms. It is centred around an analysis of the

Exposed Paintings by Callum Innes, made from 1993 to date, and employs the term object-image to

examine how such paintings make a viewer aware of their material actuality or corporeality. It

considers object-images in relation to the theory and practice of American art in the middle of the

twentieth century as well as British painting and sculpture of recent decades. The main section of

the thesis draws upon the writing of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to ask questions of our perceptual

experience of non-representational paintings especially in relation to the idea of the reciprocity of

viewer and viewed.