Post 1: Matthew Ritchie - Marie Marchant

Matthew Ritchie. Proposition Player, 2003. Installation view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas Photo by Hester + Hardaway. © Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

Proposition Player, 2003. Installation view at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas. Photo by Hester + Hardaway. © Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York.

The Lytic Circus, 2004. Mixed media installation, dimensions vary with installation. Installation view: “São Paolo Biennial XXVI”, São Paolo, Brazil. Photo © Matthew Ritchie. Courtesy of Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York



Matthew Ritchie is a contemporary artist from Britain working in New York City. Ritchie attended the Camberwell School of Art and graduated in 1986. Ritchie works with drawing and painting, which then he scans onto his computer and creates three dimensional pieces. His main collection of work is composed of these linked projects that deals with scientific properties. Each of the properties or characteristics is directly representing a function of the universe. Ritchie’s other work revolves around religion and philosophy as well as science. 

His show Proposition Player is all about gambling and quantum mechanics, dealing with chance and risk. He describes his other show The Lytic Circus as, “what happens to the unacceptable elements of risk, the ones that you want to exclude to keep the bad out”. Ritchie is particularly interested in the numbers of how we perceive the world and make decisions based off of what we know about the world. Which comes down to 0.00625% of the real universe. However, we perceive that small percentage as 100% because that is our truth. 

At Ritchie’s show Proposition Player 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 the cards attribute all of the traditional suits. But in Ritchie’s context, each card symbolized one of the forty nine characteristics that Ritchie used to create a story that described the evolution of the entire universe.

Ritchie tells Art21, "I’m interested in reconstructing that chain of evidence that leads you from the one thing to the other, because there’s the real universe, then there’s what we see, which is really just a metaphor. It is already a metaphor for the real universe". His work is very similar to the scientific process of asking questions and doing what one can with the materials available to answer these questions. Ritchie describes his work similar to a physicists journal, it is much more abstract and expected. Ideas and concepts flowing throughout the page with many possibilities. 

Art and Science best crosses over when exploring a concept like Ritchie does with quantum mechanics or when art is used to help represent these concepts as an extension of research. Art and Science intersections does not - as some may believe - mean that art will lose it’s creativity or expression or science will loose it’s academic value. They cross over seamlessly because they both explore the same thing, our natural world and universe. 



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