Matthew Ritchie

Matthew Ritchie was born in London in 1964. He received a BFA from Camberwell College of Arts in 1986 and moved to the United States the following year. Before establishing his artistic career, he worked as a chef, hospital porter, morgue attendant, house painter and building superintendent in downtown New York. He lives and works in Brooklyn with his partner and son. Ritchie creates environmental installations that bring together painting, wall drawing, light boxes, games, sculpture, film and performance. His work continuously investigates the idea of embodied information through an interconnected universe of stories and images drawn from art, architecture, science, fiction, history and cultural systems. These diverse references are linked by a shared visual language that extends across individual works, media and exhibition spaces. In 2001, Time included Ritchie in its list of innovators for the new millennium, recognising his exploration of “the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought.” His work has been presented internationally at the Whitney Biennial, Biennale of Sydney, Bienal de São Paulo, Venice Architecture Biennale, Seville Biennial and Havana Biennial. Solo exhibitions have been held at institutions including the Dallas Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; MASS MoCA; Moody Center for the Arts, Houston; Portikus, Frankfurt; Saint Louis Art Museum; and ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe. His work is held in collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, Buffalo AKG Art Museum and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ritchie has collaborated extensively with writers, musicians and dancers, including Bryce and Aaron Dessner of The National, Kim and Kelley Deal of The Breeders, Lee Ranaldo of Sonic Youth, Shara Nova, Evan Ziporyn, Hope Mohr Dance and writers Ben Marcus, Shelley Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. In 2009, he wrote the lyrics and created the video and direction for The Long Count, an hour-long multimedia song cycle conceived with Aaron and Bryce Dessner. Commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival, the work was also presented at the Krannert Center, the Holland Festival, the Barbican Centre and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston. That same year, Ritchie created the scenography for Hèctor Parra’s Hypermusic Prologue: A Projective Opera in Seven Planes, with a libretto by physicist Lisa Randall and stage direction by Paul Desveaux. The opera premiered at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and was subsequently presented at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona. Ritchie has also developed public art projects in which information associated with a particular site is integrated into the architectural structure of the work. These include a permanent installation at MIT; an award-winning commission for the Wayne Lyman Morse United States Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon; and a molecular garden created for the US Food and Drug Administration in Maryland. He conceived The Morning Line with architects Aranda\Lasch and designers from Arup AGU. Commissioned by TBA21, the large-scale modular structure combines architecture, projected imagery and spatialised sound and was presented in Seville, Istanbul and Vienna before entering the collection of ZKM. His more recent permanent projects include Everything That Rises Must Converge (2017), a four-storey installation at Cornell Tech on Roosevelt Island, and Shadow Garden (2022), an interactive sculpture commissioned for the College of Visual Arts and Design at the University of North Texas. In 2022–2023, the Frist Art Museum presented A Garden in the Flood, developed in collaboration with composer Hanna Benn and the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Ritchie is the author of The Temptation of the Diagram and has contributed to publications including Artforum, Flash Art, Art & Text, October, Contemporary and Edge. He served as Distinguished Senior Fellow in the Graduate Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania in 2009–2010, was an artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in 2012 and at Rice University’s Moody Center for the Arts in 2018, and was the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished Visiting Artist at MIT from 2018 to 2021. His distinctions include the Baloise Art Prize, an International Association of Art Critics award, an I.D. Design Award, the General Services Administration’s Design Award and National Honor Award, and an honorary doctorate in fine arts.