Matthew Ritchie

Aside from the artist's gallery work, Ritchie's investigation of New Media has further developed his universal narrative into the interactive realm. 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. 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. 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. This piece explores Ritchie’s thoughts on gambling and quantum mechanics, and the illusions that come along with the elements of chance and risk. Ritchie explains the motive behind this piece here in his 2005 interview with Art:21: "It's about the idea that in the moment between placing your bet and the result of the bet there is a kind of infinite freedom because all the possibilities are there. 'You may already be a winner!' It's fantastic—you're like a god! Everything opens up." This exhibition asked the audience to take part, and "play" Ritchie's invented game. Visitors were given a playing card by the exhibition guard, in which they would use to take part within Ritchie's proposition game. Outside of the exhibition's context, these cards could function as a usable deck of cards, since hey attribute all of the traditional suits, even including the joker. But in Ritchie’s context, each card symbolized one of the 49 characteristics that Ritchie used to create a story that described the evolution of the entire universe.

Ritchie has had over twenty-five solo exhibitions throughout his career. His first solo show was in 1995, at the Basilico Fine Arts in New York, New York. Ritchie's work has been exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Art; the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston; the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami; MASS MoCA; the SFMoMA; The Guggenheim, and the MoMA, among others. His work has also been a part of the 1997 Whitney Biennial, the 2002 Sydney Biennale, and the 2004 São Paulo Art Biennial. Ritchie has also been involved in over 100 group exhibitions since 1990 at an international level.

Ritchie's interactive work is linked to the forerunners of new media, which began to take shape as an art form in the late 1980s. New Media manipulates the medium of digital art, and uses the technology itself as the medium. Through the writings of individuals such as Lev Manovich, Marshall McLuhan, and Roy Ascott, New Media has been defined, and allotted for artists such as Ritchie to explore and create within the realm of interactive art. The interaction between online databases and meta-narrative structures are discussed in Christiane Paul's 2004 essay, "The Database as System and Cultural Form: Anatomies of Cultural Narratives". This essay sheds further light on meta-narrative structure within the premise of New Media. Paul describes this connection here: "databases do lend themselves to a categorization of information and narratives that can then be filtered to create meta-narratives about the construction and cultural specifics of the original material." Similar to past new media artists, Ritchie's interactive works originates from his invented meta-narratives, and are then coded into the online database.

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

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. Ritchie received his BFA from London's Camberwell School of Art, in the years of 1983-86. He also spent a year enrolled at Boston University in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1982. 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 February 18 to March 18 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.