The Surreal Cartography of Matthew Ritchie

Image: Matthew Ritchie's "Something Like Day" at the 21st Centry Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, 2004 (c) Junko Kimura / Getty Images

At one time I worked as a cartographic assistant, and I've long held a fascination for maps, grids and symbols. So I'm always excited to discover artists who share these obsessions. When I wrote the first iteration of this blog post almost five years ago, I was particularly taken with Matthew Ritchie's work, as I was so disenchanted with contemporary art at the time - to find an artist that I could 'connect' with gave me great hope! All the more so that Ritchie is an important, recognized artist: in 2001, he was listed as one of the top 100 innovators for the next millennium by Time magazine. His CV runs to several pages, and we are talking serious, international exhibitions and collaborative projects.
Matthew Ritchie is a classically-trained contemporary artist who has invented a personal symbolic language. His eclectic vision brings together elements of chemical formulae, physics and math, astronomy, and even paleontology. While much writing on his work (and even that by the artist himself) can be obscure, when we allow the work to speak for itself, his subtle and original symbol-system interwoven with threads of allusion is fascinating.

If you have even a passing interest in contemporary art forms, Matthew Ritchie is an artist worth tracking down. His work includes painting, wall drawings, mixed media and multimedia that sometimes defies categorization.David Ebony of Artnet discribes his work as being like "roadmaps to an alternate universe"; cartographic references are present in much of Ritchies work, including his writing.

You can visit Ritchie's intriguing website project, and for those undaunted by artspeak, read an illustrated interview with the artist himself. You can also find information and some of his work at the Andrea Rosen Gallery and read a review by David Cohen

And, importantly, Matthew Ritchie draws. In fact, he says that drawing is central to the way that he works, because "... you can just keep on pushing it, its like this infinite machine... a painting becomes a very static, fixed thing, but a drawing, you can make it three-dimensional, you can make it flat, you can turn it into a sphere, you can just keep pushing it and pushing it... ". I'm quoting Ritchie from a short film that you can see at Art 21 at PBS.org.