Matthew Ritchie is an ambitious artist. His goal is nothing more than to represent the entire universe and the structures and beliefs that we use to understand and visualize it.
He was born in London and currently lives and works in New York. He received his BFA from Camberwell School of Art in London. He also attended Boston University. He established himself in the contemporary art scene in the early 1990's. His first solo show in New York's Basilico Fine Arts ran from February 18 to March 18, 1995. The series of paintings in that first solo show identified him as an artist who "brought together historically and ideologically different belief systems in an attempt to show their common thread.”
While Ritchie is often identified as a painter, his work extends far beyond painting. He uses metal, paper, computers, mylar, light boxes, short stories, and a variety of different materials. A Ritchie installation might include sculptures, floor-to-wall installations, kiosks set up with his interactive websites, as well as traditional canvas paintings. Even though his work is so expansive, it is centered in drawing. Ritchie scans his drawings into the computer so he can manipulate them by blowing them up, deconstructing them, and/or transforming them into three-dimensional pieces. He digitally makes his images smaller and larger in order to experiment and play with his ideas beyond paper. In an interview with Art: 21, Ritchie explains his drawing process here: “I start with a collection of ideas...and I draw out all these different motifs, and then I lay them on top of each other. So I have piles of semi-transparent drawings all layered on top of each other in my studio and they form a kind of tunnel of information. Out of that, you can pull this form that turns into the sculpture or the painting. It’s literally like pulling the narrative out of overlaying all of the structures. That’s how I end up with this structure. It’s derived from a series of drawings that I scan into the computer and refine through various processes...and send to the sheet-metal shop down the road where it’s cut out of metal and assembled into larger structures which are too big for my studio.”
Ritchie has created an almost indescribable and expansive mythic narrative comprised from scientific information, his own imagination combined with elements from comic books and classic myth, and Judeo-Christian religion, occult practices, and Gnostic traditions. Beyond the first layer of this narrative is a meta-narrative that examines the belief that information is only at the surface level and looks at the limits of human consciousness in comprehending the vastness of the universe.
Ritchie's work has been shown in solo exhibits at the Dallas Museum of Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Massachusettes Museum of Contemporary Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. He was also an invited contributor at the Whitney Biennial in 1997, the Sydney Biennale in 2002, and Bienal de Sao Paulo in 2004.
Art 21 on PBS.org has a wonderful video segment that can be found at: http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/matthew-ritchie
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