Matthew Ritchie
Year of birth, place
Role at the ZKM
- Artist of the Collection
Biography
Matthew Ritchie's environmental installations of paintings, wall drawings, light boxes, games, sculpture, films and performance works are a continuous investigation of the idea of embodied information, explored through a shared universe of interconnected stories and images that draw from art, architecture, science, fiction, history and the dynamics of culture, all unified by a unique, shared visual language. He has worked extensively with writers, musicians and dancers.
In 2001, Time magazine listed Ritchie as one of 100 innovators for the new millennium, for exploring »the unthinkable or the not-yet-thought.« His work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and museums worldwide including the Whitney Biennial, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the ZKM | Karlsruhe and numerous other institutions worldwide.
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, as well as »The Morning Line«, commissioned by TBA 21, an architectural scale traveling modular architectural and sound system, that toured several European cities and a 25,000 square foot molecular garden for the Food Drug and Administration in Maryland. Today the »Morning Line« is in front of the ZKM main entrance.
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.
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. He is currently a Mentor Professor in the Graduate Visual Arts Program at Columbia University, New York and the Dasha Zhukova Distinguished visiting Artist in Residence at MIT. Awards include the Baloise Art 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, New York with his partner and son.