Matthew Ritchie

Matthew Ritchie (born 1964) is a British artist who currently lives and works in New York City.

Matthew Ritchie was born in the suburbs of London in 1964.

Ritchie went to St. Paul's School, after which, he moved on to Camberwell School of Art.

He also spent a year enrolled at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1982.

He attended the Camberwell School of Art from 1983 to 1986.

He describes himself as "classically trained" but also points to a minimalist influence.

His art revolves around a personal mythology drawn from creation myths, particle physics, thermodynamics, and games of chance, among other elements.

Ritchie is married to Garland Hunter, an artist and actress who appeared in The Tao of Steve.

Ritchie received his BFA from London's Camberwell School of Art, in the years of 1983–86.

Ritchie has established himself in the contemporary fine arts scene since the early 1990s, and had his first group exhibition in 1990 at the Judy Nielsen Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.

Ritchie's first solo show, "Working Model", was shown in New York's Basilico Fine Arts from 18 February to 18 March in 1995.

This series of paintings, wall drawings, and sculptures introduced Ritchie into the contemporary genre as an artist who "brought together historically and ideologically different belief systems in an attempt to show their common thread."

Regardless of the medium or material Ritchie uses, all of his work collaborates into a complex meta-narrative structure.

Ritchie is often seen foremost as a painter, but his work lies mainly 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 further develop 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."

This method allows Ritchie to reshape his images into sculptures, floor-to-wall installations, interactive web sites, and short stories.

Ritchie draws from numerous meta-narratives that explore religion, philosophy, and science in order to create his complicated, yet freshly simple works.

“Influenced by everything from the mythic escapades of comic-book superheroes and pagan gods to the meta-narratives of philosophy, religion, and science, Ritchie has developed a mythical narrative or cosmology of his own, and his art is communicated via a variety of art spaces and installations, including galleries throughout the world and the World Wide Web.” In an interview with Art:21, Ritchie states that he reads Nature Magazine, which is a weekly journal that publishes technical articles about contemporary scientific findings.

Ritchie's pieces have a scientific nature to them, but do not solely represent scientific agenda.

Instead, his work investigates the role of science within society, creating a narrative between order and chaos.

In Ritchie's Art:21 interviews, he explains his interest in science as "a way of having a conversation that's based on an idea of looking at things than I am in the rhetoric around science."

In other words, Ritchie is not trying to depict scientific data accurately.

He uses his research in order to find topics that are important to him, to which he then illustrates in his work.

Ritchie's work tends to include various references that expand into a comprehensive explanation historical experience or knowledge.

His meta-narratives combine all of the philosophies that interest him, and place them into a structure of information that can be bombarding, but seem to be able to go on endlessly.

His work deals with the theme of information.

Ritchie explains this theme with a few rhetorical questions and statements: "…for me the theme of my new structure was information, how do you deal with it? As a person is it possible for you to grasp everything and see everything? You're presented with everything and all through your life you’re trying to filter out, you're really just trying to control that flow."

These questions posed by Ritchie rightfully describe his thought process while creating his art, allowing the viewer to better understand his pieces beyond their aesthetic characteristics.

Aside from the artist's gallery work, Ritchie's investigation of New Media has further developed his universal narrative into the interactive realm.

Before his collaboration with the SFMOMA, Ritchie developed his first interactive piece in 1996 with the help of äda 'web, a research and development platform that services artists in order to create online interactive projects.

In his piece titled, The Hard Way, Ritchie combines several of his previous projects into an interactive site that allow the viewer to navigate through the website, experiencing the narrative by following Ritchie’s imagined avatars that represent infamous personality traits that can be found throughout our own history.

Through his text, drawings, and computer-animated realms, The Hard Way serves as a prequel to his piece with the SFMOMA, titled, The New Place.

In 2001, Ritchie was commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to be a part of e.space, which was created to examine art forms that can only exist on the World Wide Web.

Ritchie, along with six other artists: Erik Adigard, Lynn Hershman, Yael Kanarek, Mark Napier, Thomson & Craighead, and Julia Scher, created stories that could only be told through the computer screen.

The New Place was created in 2001, and is entwined with Ritchie’s larger project, Proposition Player.

The New Place includes mediums outside the web, using sculpture, painting, computer games, and other forms that are not yet defined in this "very large cross-media plan," serving as a trailer of sorts, previewing things to come.

The Proposition Player was created in 2003 for the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art.