Matthew Ritchie’s installations of painting, wall drawings, light boxes, sculpture, and projections are investigations of the idea of information,?explored through science, architecture, history and the dynamics of culture, defined equally by their range and their lyrical visual language. His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and museums worldwide including the Whitney Biennial, the Sydney Biennial, the Sao Paulo Bienal, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Seville Biennale and the Havana Biennale. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright Knox Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and numerous other institutions worldwide. Upcoming projects in 2022 include?A Garden in the Flood, a solo exhibition at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, featuring a collaboration with composer Hanna Benn and the Fisk Jubilee Singers;?Florilegium, a solo exhibition and sculpture garden at the Center for Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas, featuring?Infinite?Movement, a new opera written with composer Shara Nova for the UNT Singers;?and?The Garden in the Machine, a solo exhibition at James Cohan Gallery, New York.
He has collaborated extensively with writers, musicians and dancers, including Aaron and Bryce Dessner, Kim and Kelly Deal, Shara Nova, Lee Renaldo, Evan Ziporyn, Hope Mohr Dance, and authors such as Ben Marcus, Shelly Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. He wrote and directed?The Long Count, a multi-media song cycle that premiered at Brooklyn Academy of Music and toured to the Holland Festival and the Barbican Center, London, and collaborated on the opera?Hypermusic?with physicist Lisa Randall and?composer Hector Parra, which premiered at the Center Pompidou, Paris and traveled to the Barcelona Opera and the Guggenheim Museum.
He has worked for over fifteen years in public art, focusing on projects where the informational content of the site can be integrated in to the architectural form of the work,?including a permanent large-scale installation at MIT;?an award-winning permanent installation in the Morse Federal Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon;?The Morning Line, commissioned by TBA 21, an architectural scale traveling modular architectural and sound system that toured several European cities;?a 25,000 square foot molecular garden for the Food Drug and Administration, MD;?and a four story atrium that contains a history of technology?for Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island.
He is the author of?The Temptation of the Diagram, and has written for?Artforum,?Flash Art,?Art & Text,?October,?The?Contemporary Arts Journal?and?Edge. He has presented public lectures on numerous subjects in diverse forums including: the Einstein Centennial Symposium, Berlin; the Robert Smithson Symposium, Whitney Museum of American Art; PEN American Center at the New School for Social Research, New York; the Digital Life Design Conference, Munich; the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speakers Series, University of Michigan;?the Experiment Marathon, Serpentine Pavilion;?the Center for Art, Science and Technology at MIT, Cambridge;?'Seven on Seven’ for Rhizome; the World Science Festival; the College Art Association;?and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
From 2009-10 he was appointed Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Graduate Fine Arts Program, University of Pennsylvania; in 2012 he was Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; in 2018 he was Artist in Residence at the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University. From 2018-2021 he was appointed the Dasha Zukhova Artist in residence at MIT. He is currently a Mentor Professor in the Graduate Visual Arts Program at Columbia University, New York, and a scholar in residence at Fisk University. Awards include the Baloise Art Basel Prize, a National Association of Art Critics award, an ID design award, the Federal Art In Architecture National Honor Award and an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts.
He was born in 1964 in London, graduated from Camberwell College of Art (BFA) in 1986 and emigrated to the United States in 1987. His early experiences included working as a chef, hospital porter, morgue attendant, house painter, and many years working as a building superintendent in downtown New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn.
Mentor, Visual Arts