Matthew Ritchie was born
in London, England in 1964, and lives and works in New York. He
received a BFA from Camberwell School of Art, London, and attended
Boston
University.
His artistic
mission
has been no less ambitious than an attempt to represent the entire
universe and the structures of knowledge and belief that we use
to understand and visualize it. Ritchie’s encyclopedic project
(continually expanding and evolving like the universe itself) stems
from his imagination, and is catalogued in a conceptual chart replete
with allusions drawn from Judaeo-Christian religion, occult practices,
Gnostic traditions, and scientific elements and principles. Ritchie’s
paintings, installations, and narrative threads delineate the universe’s
formation as well as the attempts and limits of human consciousness
to comprehend its vastness. Ritchie’s work deals explicitly
with the idea of information being ‘on the surface’,
and information is also the subject of his work. Although often
described as a painter, Ritchie creates works on paper, prints,
light-box drawings, floor-to-wall installations, freestanding sculpture,
web sites, and short stories which tie his sprawling works together
into a narrative structure. Drawing is central to his work. He
scans his drawings into the computer so that images can be blown
up, taken apart, made smaller or three-dimensional, re-shaped,
transformed into digital games, or given to someone else to execute.
One ongoing work that Ritchie calls an endless drawing contains
everything he has drawn before. Ritchie’s work has been shown
in one-person exhibitions at the Dallas Museum of Art; Contemporary
Arts Museum, Houston; MASS MoCA; SFMoMA; and the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Miami, among others. His work was also exhibited at the Whitney
Biennial (1997), Sydney Biennale (2002), and São Paulo Bienale
(2004).
For additional biographic & bibliographic information:
Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York
Matthew Ritchie on the Art21 blog |
