Science—Math—Religion: By layering his collectively drawn ideas, Matthew Ritchie (1964) creates a path that leads him to each new work. Though he is known primarily as a painter, drawing is central to Ritchie’s work. Born in London, England, in 1964, he lives and works in New York and has achieved international renown. He received a BFA from Camberwell School of Art, London, and attended Boston University. The artist has an ongoing endless drawing that is composed of everything he has drawn before.
“My work deals very explicitly with the idea of information being on the surface. And in a way, information is the subject of my work. So for people who are accustomed to thinking about visual art as purely visual . . . this is a source of friction. You can always analyze visual art in terms of content or appearance. It’s a game to separate them; they’re indissolubly linked. Everything in the material world around us has a narrative.” Art:21. Information, Cells & Evil. Art:21, season 3, 2005
“It’s a given that you need the visual language to understand anything, even the most purely spectacular art. You need to have some kind of context or it just appears like a random object.” Art:21. Information, Cells & Evil. Art:21, season 3, 2005
“For me, art is a way to examine the limits of perception. I find it really interesting that all architecture starts as a blueprint; in order for a building to be understood as three-dimensional, it has to first be flattened into a colorless, linear framework. But where is the stuff behind the walls? We know it’s there, but we can’t see it! What I’m really interested in is the invisible things that hold everything together.” Art:21. Information, Cells & Evil. Art:21, season 3, 2005.
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